In his poem America Blake explored the idea of revolutions, and in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he satirizes both the state and the church. He wrote some poems, such as The French Revolution that were never published.

In the books Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience Blake wrote lyric poetry that also served as scathing social commentary. For his commissions, however, he would work in intaglio. This creates the “loose” effect of his hand on the page, present in his illuminated poems.

(For this reason, there are many different colored versions of his various poems). He would then hand-color the finished prints with watercolors. Instead of the usual intaglio style, where the plate is covered with an acid-resistant coating such as wax, and the lines scratched through the coating, so that the lines to be printed are cut into the plates Blake would paint his pictures onto the plate in the acid-resistant medium and etch the rest of the plate, so that the parts to be printed onto paper would stand up in relief. He and his former fellow apprentice James Parker opened a printshop, and worked with Joseph Johnson (a radical publisher who worked with many dissidents such as John Henry Fuseli, Richard Price, Joseph Priestly, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Paine).īlake used relief etching (or illuminated printing) to illustrate most of his writing. She became a partner in his work.īlake published his first volume of poems, Poetical Sketches around 1783. Blake ended up, perhaps accidentally, in a riot on Newgate Prison (the Gordon Riots).īlake married Catherine Boucher, who he taught to read and write, as well as training her as an engraver. In 1779, Blake joined the Royal Academy, a school of art, where he met friends such as John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard, and George Cumberland, who shared his radical views. Blake was sent to Westminster Abbey to sketch, and was inspired artistically by it additionally, he experienced visions there. James Basier drew in the older style, line-engraving (that looks similar to lineart) as opposed to the more popular painterly methods.

At that time, Blake, who enjoyed reading, started to write his own poetry.īlake was apprenticed to an engraver, and completed his apprenticeship at 21. At the age of 10 his parents enrolled him in the drawing school at the Strand. Blake was inspired as a child by artists such as Raphael, Maarten van Heemskerck, Michelangelo, and Albrecht Dürer, whose work he was introduced to through books and prints. Beyond that, he was homeschooled by his mother, Catherine. He went to school long enough to learn to read and write, leaving at age 10. William Blake (1757-1827) was a poet and engraver. William Blake William Blake Original Illustration

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The tree poem by robert frost