Lecture the theme: the romantic age in english literature (1780-1830). Representatives of romanticism

William Blake
(1757-1827)

William Blake was a poet, artist, and mystic, who followed no style but his own. Thus, his work stands alone in English literature, for no one saw life quite in the same way as he did. Blake grew in the middle of London, surrounded by the poverty of the new industrial age. His family was poor, and Blake had no opportunity to receive education as a child. When he was ten, his father was able to send him to a drawing school, and at fourteen he was apprenticed to an engraver. As an apprentice he had time to read widely and began to write the first of his poetry.
In 1778, when he had completed his apprenticeship, Blake became a professional engraver and earned a living over the next twenty years by supplying booksellers and publishers with copperplate engravings. In 1789 he published a volume of lyrical poems called “Songs of Innocence”. It was followed by a companion volume “Songs of Experience’. It was to be read in conjunction with “Songs of Innocence”. The two works contrast with each other: one deals with good, passivity, and reason; the other, with evil, violence, and emotion. They were the first of Blake’s books to be illustrated, engraved, and printed on copperplates by himself. Blake’s engravings and paintings are an important part of his artistic expression, for the verbal and visual work together evoke one unified impression. Blake himself manufactured all his poems that appeared during his lifetime.
As Blake grew older, he became more and more caught up in his mystical faith and his visions of a heavenly world. He actually saw the angels and strange figures which his pictures portrayed. They sat beside him in the garden, or in the trees, gathering around him as naturally as a group of friends. Those visions loosened him from the material world, in which so much of the eighteenth century was stuck fast as in a slough of mental despond. Repression he regarded as evil, though freedom from repression he interpreted not psychologically, as in the contemporary manner, but mystically. As a child he was fascinated by the Bible and by the ideas of the German mystic Jacob Boeme. Blake’s later symbolic works, including “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (1790), “The Gates of Paradise”(1793), and “Jerusalem” (1804), reflect his ever-deepening reflections about God and man. His interest in the supernatural and his imaginative experimentation with his art and verse classify him, like Robert Burns, as a pre-Romantic. Even today scholars continue to puzzle over the complex philosophical symbolism of his later works, but all readers can appreciate the delicate lyricism of his “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”.
The short poem given below is from the volume “Songs of Inno-cence”. The symbolic images of rose and worm may make you puzzle too:


The Sick Rose
O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.