William Blake: 1757-1827

First, Blake's Wikipedia entry should provide a (very, very) brief introduction to the poet's life and work. A better starting point especially for those aspiring Blake scholars who have taken a strong interest in the visual accompaniment to the poetry might be the William Blake Archive, which, along with displaying an absolutely beautiful example of the artist's work on its main page, contains an impressive database of plates, including the material unforgivably omitted from the Wu Anthology. Accompanying some helpful biographical details, Turning the Pages offers a stunning direct copy of one of Blake's notebooks, and explains the content of each of its pages--thus the website title--with a fair amount of detail. Fellow students who find themselves fascinated by the poet's various quirks might want to take note of the observation on the introduction page that Blake turned his notebook upside-down when he ran out of space in order to continue working. To go with the images I linked to earlier, here are Blake's complete works, edited by David V. Erdman.

Now, because I believe that contextualization never hurts, I've decided to bring up a contemporary artist who I've associated with Blake or his artistic lineage, as it were, since I discovered him. The artist Joe Coleman, distinguished by his meticulous, disturbing work and his unhealthy obsession with geek acts and freak shows, which I won't link to in the spirit of civility, shares several uncanny stylistic and philosophical tendencies with Blake. Like the poet, he believes that creation and destruction are directly related, and that order and purity are not only undesirable, but unachievable. His art also relies on a highly personalized vision and symbolic order--and on a nightmarish eschatological mentality which is equally thrilling and terrifying. Picking Coleman's contemporary works apart over the years has, I think, prepared me for the intense personal involvement called for in reading Blake. The poet doesn't just demand analysis and explication--his work calls for introspection, and at least for me, a revision of perspective. I believe that the work is as influential as it is because it was written to a certain extent for the poet's own sake, because it aims not to reinterpret but to create anew, and with Blake's imagination as its source. This is the poetry of the self, and it imposes self-evaluation on the reader just as its composition must have transformed the thoughts of the poet.