William Blake was a visionary artist and poet who mixed words and images in his unique, hand-colored, and hand-printed books to express his thoughts in the form of art.William Blake did not consider himself a poet or a painter; he saw himself as a craftsman. Blake believed that all artists should consider themselves to be craftsmen and not think of themselves as anything more.In the mid-19th century, interest in Blake’s art expanded, and by the 20th century, Blake was revered for the profound, intellectual, creative, and mystical components in his art.Today, William Blake is considered to be one of Britain’s greatest artists and poets. In a BBC poll of the 100 Greatest Britons in 2002, Blake was ranked number 38.Continue reading to learn more information about William Blake and his poems. After this, you may also look at other fun fact articles about Willa Cather and William Faulkner.Fun Facts About William BlakeWilliam Blake was born in 1757 in Soho, London, to a hosier father. Blake had religious visions since he was a child. His father sent him to Henry Pars’ drawing school at the age of ten, where Blake learned to copy from prints and plaster casts, and he was an apprentice to the engraver James Basire in 1772. William Blake was influenced by the ideas and ambitions of the French and American Revolutions, notwithstanding his hostility to the Church of England.Blake’s master was the engraver to the London Society of Antiquaries, and he was sent to do drawings of graves and monuments at Westminster Abbey, where his lifelong passion for gothic art was born. In 1779, William Blake enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools, but he detested life drawing and preferred classical sculptures and Greek vase paintings instead. During his first year at the Royal Academy, William Blake made friends with John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard, and George Cumberland. Stothard and Cumberland shared extreme beliefs, and both joined the Society for Constitutional Information. Blake’s father’s death gave him the opportunity to perfect a printing method that allowed him to merge his visionary writings and images on a single printing plate.Blake’s livelihood was dependent on benefactors, although some, like the well-intentioned William Hayley, were more concerned with his well-being than his art. William Blake was regarded as exceptionally odd and unworldly, even at a time when personal experience and great ideas were widely respected. In Blake’s final decade, a new generation of young Romantic artists began to notice Blake’s works. Blake was commissioned to depict Dante’s Divine Comedy in 1826. Due to Blake’s death, the project was cut short, although even today, it is known to be one of his best works of art in the field. Blake sketched a painting of his wife while she was crying by his bed on the day he died. On the evening of August 12, 1827, around 6 p.m., William Blake died. Blake was buried five days after the eve of his 45th wedding anniversary.Facts About William Blake’s PoemsA visionary poet is one who uses his imagination to create wonderful images, and Blake had been a visionary since he was a child.Blake claims to have had a vision of God who, when he was four, smashed his head into his room and made him scream. He had another vision four years later, and this time it was a vision of angels completely engulfed by tree branches. He saw visions of kings in his youth and painted representations of the great dead talking with living beings from the world of fantasy in his later years.William Blake is a classic artist who wrote romantic poetry with the use of imagery, symbolism, metaphors, and revolutionary spirit, as well as plain language and spontaneous expression of thoughts and feelings.‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ is one of the most well-known works of poetry and art by Blake. It was first published in 1789, and it was inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts. ‘The Tyger’ is one of the book’s most renowned poems.In many ways, Blake’s poem ‘Jerusalem’ is his crowning effort. There are 100 illuminated plates in this epic poem. In ‘Jerusalem’, Blake expands on his mythology in order to investigate man’s fall and salvation. Man is separated from God and split into different personalities as the story begins. Man’s two identities are harmonized as the poem progresses, and man is reunited with the divinity that resides within him.His writings also chastised marriage rules and external demands for marital fidelity, which Blake saw as reducing love to a chore rather than genuine devotion. As a result, Blake is seen as a pioneer of the Free Love Movement, which ended government intrusion in areas of sexuality like adultery, marriage and even birth control. Blake had become a supporter of the American and French revolution in politics. Blake wrote ‘The Four Zoas’ as a mystical fable that foreshadowed the future and demonstrated how evil is founded in man’s basic abilities of reason, passion, instinct, and imagination. Blake published ‘Poetical Sketches’ when he was 26 years old. This was the only volume of Blake’s poetry that he wrote and published in a traditional printed format.Facts About William Blake’s FamilyCatherine Sophia Boucher was the poet, painter, and engraver who married William Blake and was a constant presence in his life. On August 18, 1782, in St Mary’s Church, Battersea, London, William Blake married Catherine Sophia Boucher. Catherine signed her wedding contract with an X because she was illiterate. Blake instilled in his wife the ability to read and write. He even taught her how to engrave, and she proved to be a significant asset to him in a number of projects.Blake opened a print shop next door to his father’s shop when his father died in 1784. Following the death of his beloved brother Robert in 1787, it was said that Robert spoke through Blake’s visions. Robert, William claimed, was the one who gave him the idea for a novel way of illuminated etching. The words and patterns were drawn backward on a plate that had been coated with an acid-resistant material, and then acid was added. Pages were printed and hand-colored from these etched plates. Almost all of Blake’s large poems were printed using his unique methods.Facts About William Blake’s ChildhoodWilliam Blake was a poet, and painter, born in the London neighborhood of Soho in 1757. William Blake was born on November 28, 1757, in London. He was the third child out of the seven children that James Blake, a hosiery shop owner, and Catherine Wright Blake had. William only went to school until he was 10 years old, after which his mother educated him at home. He had a strong desire to be a young artist since he was a child, so when he turned ten years old, his parents recognized his skills and admitted him to Henry Pars’ Drawing School in London.Blake was influenced by the Bible from an early age, and it remained a source of inspiration for him throughout his life. Blake found that he enjoyed engraving images of drawings of Greek artifacts that his father had acquired for him, a practice he favored to real drawing. After finishing at drawing school, at the age of fourteen, William began a seven-year apprenticeship with James Basire, an English engraver. He was soon a professional engraver by the end of the term, at the age of 21, and he made a living for the rest of his life through engraving. Blake’s early engravings were actually just a copy of the designs done by other artists, but as his name grew, he was commissioned to engrave his own art. During the 1810s, he spent six years of his life in Fountain Court, surrounded by a group of admiring young artists. Blake’s illustrations for the ‘Book of Job’ and his unfinished Dante are examples of his best visual work as an artist. His health began to deteriorate in 1824, and he died singing on August 12, 1827, in London, England.Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly facts for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our William Blake facts about the visionary English poet, then why not take a look at our other articles on William Gilbert facts or William Golding facts?
William Blake was a visionary artist and poet who mixed words and images in his unique, hand-colored, and hand-printed books to express his thoughts in the form of art.
