Blake, William
From Srafopedia
William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) was an English poet, visionary, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake's work is today considered seminal and significant in the history of both poetry and the visual arts. He was voted 38th in a poll of the 100 Greatest Britons organized by the BBC in 2002.
According to Northrop Frye, who undertook a study of Blake's entire poetic corpus, his prophetic poems form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language." Others have praised Blake's visual artistry, at least one modern critic proclaiming Blake "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced." Once considered mad for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is highly regarded today for his expressiveness and creativity, and the philosophical vision that underlies his work. As he himself once indicated, "The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself."
While his visual art and written poetry are usually considered separately, Blake often employed them in concert to create a product that at once defied and superseded convention. Though he believed himself able to converse aloud with Old Testament prophets, and despite his work in illustrating the Book of Job, Blake's affection for the Bible was accompanied by hostility for the established Church, his beliefs modified by a fascination with Mysticism and the unfolding of the Romantic Movement around him. Ultimately, the difficulty of placing William Blake in any one chronological stage of art history is perhaps the distinction that best defines him.
Blake and Religion
Although Blake's attacks on conventional religion were shocking in his own day, his rejection of religiosity was not a rejection of religion per se. His view of conventional religion is evident in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where he wrote in Proverbs of Hell:
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion and As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
Blake's described his personal religion as the ‘everlasting Gospel’, which he saw as the original, revelation that he believed Jesus preached. In The Everlasting Gospel, Blake does not present Jesus simply as a philosopher or indeed as the traditional Messiah but as a supremely creative being, above dogma, logic and even morality:
If he had been Antichrist, Creeping Jesus, He'd have done anything to please us: Gone sneaking into the Synagogues And not used the Elders & Priests like Dogs, But humble as a Lamb or an Ass, Obey himself to Caiaphas. God wants not man to humble himself Jesus, for Blake, symbolises the vital relationship and unity between divinity and humanity: all had originally one language and one religion: this was the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus.
Blake designed his own mythology, which appears largely in his prophetic books. It was based mainly upon the Bible and on Greek mythology, to accompany his ideas about the everlasting Gospel. Blake commented that he had to create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's.
One of Blake's strongest objections to orthodox Christianity is that he felt it encouraged the suppression of natural desires and discouraged earthly joy. In A Vision of the Last Judgement, Blake says that Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern'd their Passions or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion, but Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory.
Blake believed that the joy of man glorified God and that the religion of this world is actually the worship of Satan. He thought of Satan as Error and the 'State of Death’. Blake believes that orthodox Christians, partly because of their denial of earthly joy, are actually worshipping Satan.
Blake was against the sophistry of theological thought that excuses pain, admits evil and apologises for injustice. He abhorred attempts to buy bliss in the next world with self-denial in this.
He saw the concept of 'sin' as a trap to bind men’s desires (the briars of Garden of Love), and believed that restraint in obedience to a moral code imposed from the outside was against the spirit of life, writing:
Abstinence sows sand all over The ruddy limbs & flaming hair, But Desire Gratified Plants fruits & beauty there. He did not hold with the doctrine of God as a Lord, an entity separate from and superior to mankind. This is very much in line with his belief in liberty and equality in society and between the sexes.
From Wikipedia
Blake and His Dark Materials
Philip Pullman cites Blake as one of the three major influences on "His Dark Materials." His view of traditional Christianity as an undesirable restraint on human freedom and passions is very much in line with the ideology of His Dark Materials. Blake's reinterpretation of John Milton's Paradise Lost was particularly influential. Blake argued that Milton wrote far more convincingly and sympathetically of Lucifer than of God, and that he was of the Devil's party without knowing it. This contradicted previous claims that Milton had provided an orthodox interpretation of the Biblical story. Pullman takes Blake's side and goes farther, placing himself explicitly against God and more or less on the side of Lord Asriel, his Lucifer stand-in. Finally, Blake was notable for his combination of text and illustration, the arts of writer and engraver. Pullman did much the same thing by creating woodcuts as chapter headings in the first two books of His Dark Materials.
