BIBLIOGRAPHY:
– William Blake. El Matrimonio del Cielo y del Infierno. Edición Facsímil y Bilingüe. Estudio Preliminar, Traducción y Notas de José Luis Palomares. Editorial Hiperión, 2001.
– Los bosques de la noche. Edición bilingüe y anotada de Jordi Doce. Colección La Cruz del Sur. Editorial Pre-Textos, 2001.
– Milton. Un poema. William Blake. Edición y traducción de Bel Atreides. DVD ediciones, 2002.
– Blake. Poesía Completa. Edición Bilingüe. Traducción Pablo Mañé Garzón. Ediciones 29, 1999.
– William Blake. Antonogía Bilingüe. Introducción y Traducción de Enrique Caracciolo Trejo. Alianza Editorial, 2002.
– William Blake. Katheleen Raine. Bibliographical Series of Supplements to British Book News. Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1951.
– A Short Story of Everything. Stephen Hawking. Phoenix Books, 2005.
INTERNET RESOURCES:
– William Blake Complete Works site
– Songs of Imaginations and Digitisation
– Department of Physics and Astronomy. University of Southern California
– YouTube
Childhood 1757 – 1767 (Age 1-10)
William Blake was born on November 28, 1757 in London at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, where his father had a successful hosiery business. Since Blake was an unruly child his parents educated him at home instead of formal school. He spent his youth roaming about London and the countryside on the edge of town. He describes this in a song from his Poetical Sketches which he started writing at the age of thirteen:
How sweet I roamed from field to field
And tasted all the summer’s pride
At the age of about ten, Blake said that he saw his ‘first vision’ when, sauntering along on Peckham Rye, he looked up to see a tree filled with angels. According to the accounts Blake gave of his literary development, he was already reading the works of Milton and Isaiah as a child.
Apprenticeship 1767 – 1778 (Age 10-21)
At the age of ten, Blake was sent to Mr Pars’ drawing school in the Strand, where he copied plaster-casts of ancient sculptures. His father, unable to afford the cost of placing Blake as the pupil of a leading painter, took the prudent decision to apprentice him to an engraver at the age of fourteen. Blake’s master, James Basire of Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn, was engraver to the London Society of Antiquaries. As a result, Blake was sent to Westminster Abbey to make drawings of tombs and monuments. Here he learned to love gothic art. He stood on the tombs to view them better and even made sketches when the grave of Edward I was opened.
In his free time, Blake collected prints of then unfashionable artists such as Durer, Raphael, and Michelangelo. In literature too, he rejected eighteenth-century polish, preferring the Elizabethans (Shakespeare, Jonson and Spenser) and ancient ballads, both authentic (such as Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry), and forged (such as Macpherson’s Ossian and Chatterton’s Poems of Rowley).
The Academy and Marriage 1779–1784 (Age 21-27)
In August 1779, Blake was admitted to the Royal Academy (founded by the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds who was then its president). Paying his way by producing engravings for novels and catalogues, Blake drew from casts, life models and corpses, and shared in the dream of founding a new English school of historical painting.
There was, however, friction between Blake and his teachers. Reynolds recommended that he work with ‘less extravagance and more simplicity’, while George Michael Moser, another teacher there, discouraged Blake’s admiration for the ‘old, hard, stiff and dry unfinished works’ of Raphael and Michelangelo. On the other hand, Blake was inspired by the artist James Barry and his grand historical paintings. He made friends with other young artists and was able to exhibit his own historical watercolours.
Blake married Catherine Boucher at St Mary’s, Battersea in 1782. The newly-weds then moved out of Blake’s father’s house to Green Street, near Leicester Square. In the next year Blake’s Poetical Sketches were published, and there was even talk of raising a subscription to send him to study in Rome.
Printseller & poet 1784 – 1790 (Age27-33)
In the summer of 1784, Blake’s father died. While the eldest son, James, took over the hosiery business in number 28, Blake and his wife moved into the next-door house at 27 Broad Street. There he set up in business as a print seller in partnership with James Parker. The partnership lasted only three years, and in 1787 Blake moved to a house around the corner in Poland Street. In the same year his beloved younger brother, Robert, died. Blake sat by him during his last illness, and claimed to see his spirit pass through the ceiling on its way to heaven.
Blake said that the spirit of Robert came to him ‘in a vision in the night’ and revealed the secret technique for combining poem and picture on a single printing plate. In 1788, Blake started work on the first of his illuminated books using this method. His first efforts were in simple, chapbook style, but by 1789, The Songs of Innocence had been completed with Blake and his wife hand-producing the book. In the words of Blake’s first biographer Alexander Gilchrist, they did everything ‘except manufacturing the paper’.
A Modern Prophet 1791 – 1794 (Age 34-37)
Lambeth was still a village when Blake and his wife moved to No. 13 Hercules Buildings in 1791. A much larger house than any Blake had lived in before, it provided the light and space that he needed for his work. Blake now entered upon the most creative and productive period of his life.
Blake’s work had become more overtly political after the upheavals in France in 1789. His poem The French Revolution, though printed in 1791 by Joseph Johnson (publisher of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man), was deemed too dangerous to actually publish. By this time, Blake already felt himself to be losing out to his contemporaries in the art world, and now he saw the door to public recognition closing. The 1793 co-publication of The Gates of Paradise, an emblem book for children, was Blake’s last venture into commercial publishing. In October of the same year, Blake published his Prospectus a public advertisement of his recent works. The Prospectus was also a critique of the establishment and the difficulty of gaining reconition for artists who lacked ‘the means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius’. Blake was literally taking matters into his own hands by producing his own work and offering it for sale at his home.
The Prospectus advertised the illuminated prophetic books which had begun to pour forth from his press: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a brief epic interspersed with proverbs, The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, an allegory about freedom, and America, A Prophecy, a mixture of history and myth, all date from 1793.
There was no letting up in 1794, when The Songs of Experience (the pessimistic ‘contrary’ volume to The Songs of Innocence) was completed. In the same year Blake also published Europe, A Prophecy (an allegory of the political situation in Europe with warnings about the dire consequences of war), and The First Book of Urizen (his account of the origins of mankind and the natural world).
Declining Fortunes 1795 – 1800 (Age 38-43)
The illustrations in Blake’s Prophetic Books had been growing ever larger and more colourful. It was therefore a logical step for him to adapt his printing-methods to produce full-scale paintings. The year 1795 saw the production of the series of twelve large watercolour prints, including Newton and Nebuchadnezzar and The House of Death (shown here), which biographer Peter Ackroyd calls ‘the finest artistic statement of Blake’s Lambeth visions’.
In 1796, Richard Edwards, a bookseller, commissioned Blake to illustrate Young’s Night Thoughts, a philosophical verse epic immensely popular in the late eighteenth century. Ultimately, however, Edwards lost interest, and finally less than half the poem was published, with only forty-three engravings from Blake’s 500 watercolours. Blake’s friend, the sculptor John Flaxman, commissioned him to illustrate the poems of Thomas Gray. In addition, Blake’s most important patron the civil servant Thomas Butts, commissioned a series of Biblical paintings from him. However, this work was not enough to compensate for price inflation and the depressed art market, caused by the war with France.
Work was scarce and life was hard, so it seemed like a stroke of luck when William Hayley, an eccentric gentleman poet, invited Blake down to live on his estate in Sussex. The Blakes were glad to leave the ‘terrible desert of London’ for ‘sweet Felpham’.
Country Life 1800 – 1803 (Age 43-46)
Delighted by the natural beauty around him, Blake embarked on his new life in Sussex with great optimism. Blake received many commissions from his new patron, producing plates for Hayley’s ballad Little Tom the Sailor, and engravings for his Ballads on Anecdotes relating to Animals and for his Life of Cowper.
But by 1802, the situation had soured. Blake was tired of the endless stream of trivial commissions from Hayley and his society neighbours. He had no wish to waste his talents painting a series of great poets’ portraits for Hayley’s new library (see portrait of Milton above), or handscreens for his neighbour, Lady Bathurst. The next year Blake wrote a letter to his patron Butts stating that only in London that he could ‘carry on his visionary studies…see visions, dream dreams’.
To make matters worse, in August 1803 Blake had driven a soldier, Private John Schofield, out of his garden, allegedly uttering the treasonous words ‘Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves.’ Scheduled to be put on trial for sedition, Blake moved back to London in late 1803, thoroughly sick of his officious patron, of his damp cottage and of the law. He briefly returned to Sussex in early 1804 and was acquitted to the riotous approval of the court.
Poverty 1804 – 1818 (Age 47-61)
Blake’s optimism about his return to London was ill-founded. At his new lodgings on the first floor of No. 17 South Moulton Street, he began work on the illuminated books, Milton and Jerusalem. However, commercial work proved even more elusive than it had before. ‘Art in London flourishes,’ he wrote, ‘yet no one brings work to me’.
When the publisher Robert Cromek approached him to both illustrate and engrave the poet Robert Blair’s Grave, Blake’s luck seemed to have taken a turn for the better. The disappointment was only the more intense, therefore, when Cromek ultimately chose the artist Schiavonetti to engrave Blake’s illustrations instead of Blake himself. The Grave proved a success, but Blake received little financial reward. He now became increasingly paranoid and cantankerous, breaking off from most of his friends and patrons.
In 1806, Cromek teamed up with the artist Thomas Stothard to produce a painting and engraving of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims. Blake claimed they had stolen the idea from him and when Stothard’s work was exhibited to great acclaim, Blake decided to hold a one-man exhibition centered around his own version of the Canterbury Pilgrims. Unfortunately, he could not afford to show his work in a fashionable part of town, so his exhibition was held in his brother’s hosiery shop in May 1809. Almost no one came. The reviews were cruel, mocking Blake as ‘an unfortunate lunatic whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement’, and dismissing his Descriptive Catalogue as ‘a farrago of nonsense…and egregious vanity’.
By 1810, Blake was impoverished and estranged from his friends and patrons. Indeed his first biographer entitled the chapter dealing with the period 1810-1817 ‘Years of Deepening Neglect’. But Blake continued to work, believing his Jerusalem, an epic about war, peace and liberty focused on London, to be his finest work.
William Blake and the Illuminated Book
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite. This I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
In the late 1780s, William Blake revived the Illuminated Manuscript. Blake, an engraver by trade and prophet by vocation, believed that the Printed Book was an example of the way in which the «the Satanic Mills» of the industrial revolution had denigrated art into a mass commodity. For his own politically satiric and poetically visionary works, he developed the Illuminated Book as means of fusing the visual and the literary into a form which–according to Blake–would cleanse the «doors of perception,» that is the senses and their relationship to the imagination, and awaken Man from the «sleep of reason.»
Exactly how Blake produced his Illuminated Books remains unclear. However, we know that each page was produced by deeply etching copper plates, possibly (as the quotation above suggests) with the aid of corrosive acids, with both text and elaborate pictorial designs. These plates would then be used to make prints either by a form of colour-printing with an opaque medium or by using a single coloured ink. In the latter case, the print would then be illuminated by hand using water-colours. Each of his Illuminated Books was thus a unique work of art and a radical break with not only traditional book printing but the traditional means of presenting poetic and philosophical discourse.
Each page of an Illuminated Book presents a section of richly e/al-lusive text (Blake developed an elaborate private mythology to critique eighteenth century society) surrounded by allegorical images, the Tree of Life, the frowning face of Urizen, the flames of Orc. These images exist in a kind of dialectical relationship with the text, not simply illustrating the narrative, but embellishing it, adding another dimension that secures it from any reductively literal reading.
The utter originality of these publications, together with their time-consuming mode of production and Blake’s often abstruse poetic style, ensured their almost complete obscurity. Only nine copies of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for example, are known to exist.
Blake’s attempt to adjust the formal properties of the book to accord with his own aesthetic principles, to in effect use the very medium of publication as a form of political subversion, remains salutary. The Illuminated Books, from The Songs of Innocence to the monumental Milton and Jerusalem, strive toward a kind of polyphonic, almost cinematic melding of the written and the visual which anticipate many of the possibilities of multi-media hypertexts.
© 1993-2000 Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin, Robin Parmar.
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Página visitada el 25-10-2010
Using the William Blake Archive in Teaching Poetry
Josephine A. McQuail
Professor of English
Tennessee Technological University
It is surely one of the biggest ironies in literary history that a poet stubbornly opposed to technological progress in his own reproduction of his texts is featured in one of the most advanced online archives on the Worldwide WEB. I am of course referring to William Blake and the William Blake Archive (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/blake/public/about/glance/ ), which has been devoted to his works by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. The Archive has made available most of Blake’s illuminated books, some of them in numerous copies, In addition, Standard Generalized Markup Language tagging allows one to search both text and the content of illustrations, and to call up editorial annotations of an image independently or in conjunction with a search using Inote, JAVA-based software developed at IATH. The Blake archive is of a wonderful resource, but it does have some limitations. What does it offer, and where is it wanting?
Blake is a difficult poet to teach, not only because of the density of his poetry, but because of the proliferation of copies that he printed himself (175 known copies of 18 books), often introducing variation into the text, the image, or even the pagination of copies! How does one «read» one of Blake’s books, then: which copy does one choose, what order should the pages be in? The Archive could help with this textual problem, and it is now easy to find out the different orderings given by Blake to plates, or pages of copies in the Archive (if not other copies) by clicking on About This Edition. The Archive is a wonderful way to broadcast to students that Blake HAS often printed several different versions of his book, which is more difficult to do when one has ONE required facsimile edition that students use for the course. With the online archive, students can see from this selection of some of Blake’s illuminated books that he most often did several printings of them and that they differ significantly. The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the volume Blake printed in the largest number, is represented by several printings (see http://dazzle.village.virginia.edu:8888/blake/Illuminated-Book/SONGSIE/@Generic__CollectionView). Some books are underepresented, however; for instance, Blake’s masterpiece, Jerusalem, is still not on the archive in an illuminated edition.
What does the ability to view Blake online do to our notion of the book and the «aura» of the printed originals? Is it any different to see Blake’s work as a series of electronic images rather than pages in a book or a series of illuminated pages? Of course, viewing his work in online images is preferable to reading only typographical renditions of his poetry, which is what some teachers and students have had to make do with. But is this online archive a possible substitute for the scholar considering the production and provenance of Blake’s books? Probably not; for one certainly misses out on the feel for the physical process of Blake’s printmaking in viewing electronic images, yet, as the archive’s RLG Diginews article points out (see below), the «value, rarity, and extreme fragility» of the originals, as well as their dispersal in libraries, museums, and private collections across continents, makes examining them increasingly difficult. The online images have some advantages, as well: using Inote, one can zoom in on an image or feature of Blake’s plates; and the ability to search for images throughout editions on the archive is unprecedented (see http://dazzle.village.virginia.edu/blake-search/image.html#figure ). The ability to search for words or phrases extends from the online’s archive to Erdman’s The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake and its Concordance (http://dazzle.village.virginia.edu/blake-search/text.html ).
How do these electronic images compare to other facsimiles attempted of Blake? After all, some facsimiles, like the Dover editions, are notoriously poor. Others, like the Trianon press edition of Blake’s The [First] Book of Urizen were forced to choose a version of Blake’s original that was an illuminated printing (colors applied with watercolor after intaglio printing) rather than a color printed copy (colors applied directly on the copper plate and printed). The experience is akin to seeing a slide of a work of art, rather than the actual physical object. Some of the Blake facsimiles (especially the Trianon) strove to capture the aura of the original with special cases, paper and binding used for their editions. This is of course lacking with the electronic images. The experience of the artifact of the book is, as with other computer textual applications, different. However, at least the reader sees Blake’s poems in conjunction with his images on the Blake Archive!
But the archive’s attempt to facsimile Blake was as painstaking as anything the Trianon Press undertook after World War II, working with the Blake Trust to preserve his illuminated books in facsimile so that another such devastating war or other disaster would not threaten to wipe out Blake’s legacy. The Trianon Press had master colorists analyze the colors of the original and make stencils which were applied to a monochrome outline to approach the way Blake worked with his illuminated prints (printed in monochrome and colored with watercolor); as many as 30 stencils had to be applied to color plates of the Urizen facsimile. The editors and staff of the William Blake Archive describe in their article «The Persistence of Vision: Images and Imaging at the William Blake Archive»in RLG Digital News (http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews4-1.html#feature1) how painstaking this process is, claiming that it yields, though, «images . . . more accurate in color, detail, and scale than the finest commercially published photomechanical reproductions.
In addition to the selection of Blake’s illuminated books, the archive features a selected bibliography of criticism, David Erdman’s notes and typographical text of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. It also contains a bibliography of art historical works on Blake. These will also help to make that famously inaccessible British romantic poet into one of the most accessible poets electronically. Could this influence Blake’s reputation and place in the Romantic canon? Perhaps it could. Students definitely find it easier to make discoveries about Blake with the Blake archive, and it provides global access to materials formerly available to only specialized scholars. It will revolutionize the reading of Blake, though perhaps at a cost.
However, the Blake archive is a perfect venue for encouraging student interaction with a text, whether in the traditional classroom or in an online class. Some of the ways I have used the archive have called for students to explore it on their own and write about their experience; I have also taken a computer and monitor directly into the classroom to show students the way the poems’ illuminations can give clues to interpreting the poems. For instance, there are the un-Romantic straight lines in the illustration to «Holy Thursday» of Innocence (http://dazzle.village.virginia.edu:8888/blake/Illuminated-Book/SONGSIE/songsie.c/@Generic__BookTextView/2459 ) which imply an ironic reading of the poem. «To Tirzah» is a poem that points Blake in a direction beyond Innocence and of Experience. It was added later to Experience than the other poems in the volume; students also must see the image in order to get a hint at the meaning of the poem (http://dazzle.village.virginia.edu:8888/blake/Illuminated-Book/SONGSIE/songsie.z/@Generic__BookTextView/12390 ): a figure on the right side of the page has the tag «It is Raised a Spiritual Body» on it, and to the spiritual is the direction Blake seems to recommend at the end of the volume. The title page of The Book of Thel with its illustration of human figures in flowers, the male embracing the female, brings in the heated sexuality which the text of the poem implies (http://dazzle.village.virginia.edu:8888/blake/Illuminated-Book/THEL/thel.o/@Generic__BookTextView/208 ). One can show them these images in class, or ask students to go to them in a computer lab; a more interactive assignment would be to ask them to work individually or in groups (both can be done in an online class) and find illustrations in certain volumes that give clues to Blake’s meanings, or illustrations that don’t seem to fit the poem (like that to «Holy Thursday,» op cit., or «The Tyger») and call for an interpretation.
Other projects could include having students compare different copies of an illuminated book and determine how the different plate orders (of poems in the Songs or images in other books) or variants in text affect interpretation. Another assigment is to call for a comparison between texts and images in a couple of illuminated books. Or how about simply getting students to report on various aspects of the Blake Archive? One thing that may be as difficult to study on the archive as with texts is any discussion of metrics or rhyme: there are no critical works on the archive that would help students do this. Still, these other kinds of tasks could get students involved in the type of active learning that fires their enthusiasm, in a way more difficult to achieve when a teacher merely «models» enthusiasm.
http://epc.buffalo.edu/conferences/00/mla/mcquail.htm
Página visitada el 25-10-2010