The author's wide-ranging research includes interviews with many of Blake's surviving friends, whose personal recollections add warmth and immediacy to this portrait.
William Blake (1757 - 1827)
Extensive quotes from the subject's poetry and prose — practically unknown at the time of the original publication — further enliven the text. In addition to a critical commentary on Blake's boyhood poems, this transformative biography features more than 40 of his illustrations. Read more Read less. Add both to Cart Add both to List. These items are shipped from and sold by different sellers.
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Gilchrist had two things going for him as Blake's first biographer. He remains the only one of them all who actually got to talk to people who knew Blake, who were friends with he and his wife.
William Blake Biography
At age ten, Blake expressed a wish to become a painter, so his parents sent him to drawing school. Two years later, Blake began writing poetry. When he turned fourteen, he apprenticed with an engraver because art school proved too costly. One of Blake's assignments as apprentice was to sketch the tombs at Westminster Abbey, exposing him to a variety of Gothic styles from which he would draw inspiration throughout his career.
After his seven-year term ended, he studied briefly at the Royal Academy. In , he married an illiterate woman named Catherine Boucher. Blake taught her to read and to write, and also instructed her in draftsmanship.
Later, she helped him print the illuminated poetry for which he is remembered today; the couple had no children. In he set up a printshop with a friend and former fellow apprentice, James Parker, but this venture failed after several years.
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For the remainder of his life, Blake made a meager living as an engraver and illustrator for books and magazines. In addition to his wife, Blake also began training his younger brother Robert in drawing, painting, and engraving. Robert fell ill during the winter of and succumbed, probably to consumption. As Robert died, Blake saw his brother's spirit rise up through the ceiling, "clapping its hands for joy.
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Blake's first printed work, Poetical Sketches , is a collection of apprentice verse, mostly imitating classical models. He published his most popular collection, Songs of Innocence , in and followed it, in , with Songs of Experience. Some readers interpret Songs of Innocence in a straightforward fashion, considering it primarily a children's book, but others have found hints at parody or critique in its seemingly naive and simple lyrics.
William Blake - Poet | Academy of American Poets
Both books of Songs were printed in an illustrated format reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts. The text and illustrations were printed from copper plates, and each picture was finished by hand in watercolors. The book became the first standard text on the Blake, a foundation of the extensive scholarship on his life and work. The original edition was subtitled 'Pictor Ignotus', Latin for "unknown artist", a common phrase used for unattributed artworks. Here it refers to Blake's obscurity at the time. The phrase was taken from the recently published poem of that title by Robert Browning , part of which was used as an epigraph.
Both are referred as Gilchrist's Blake or Life. Several of Blake's short poems, such as ' The Tyger ', were typeset during his lifetime and had become widely known since the author's death in , having been reproduced in commonplace books by William Wordsworth and others; however, the larger corpus of his work remained in relative obscurity. The second volume, edited and annotated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, included most of Blake's songs, verse and other poetry, his prose, and letters. These were often the first publication in typeset.
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The editors sometimes adapted the works during transcription, printing 'Tyger' as 'Tiger' for the well known example, and largely excluded discussion and republication of the 'Prophetic Books'. The transcriptions included the Poetical Sketches selections , the Songs of Innocence and of Experience , the Book of Thel , and unpublished poetry from manuscript as "Ideas of Good and Evil". Prose works include the rare " Descriptive Catalogue ", Blake's description of the paintings exhibited at his solo exhibition in