Research paper on William Blake



Research paper on William Blake

William Blake (1757-1827), English artist, mystic and poet wrote Songs of Innocence (1789): a poetry collection written from the child's point of view, of innocent wonderment and spontaneity in natural settings which includes “Little Boy Lost”, “Little Boy Found” and Later editions would see Innocence and Experience contained in one volume. As a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Thomas Paine, Blake was among the literati of London's intellectual circle though he was often labeled an eccentric or worse, insane or demented. His works did not gain much acclaim or commercial success until long after his death.

Although he had several patrons over the course of his life and produced voluminous works, he often lived in abject poverty. Though it is hard to classify Blake's body of work in one genre, he heavily influenced the Romantic poets with recurring themes of good and evil, heaven and hell, knowledge and innocence, and external reality versus inner. Going against common conventions of the time, Blake believed in sexual and racial equality and justice for all, rejected the Old Testament's teachings in favour of the New, and abhorred oppression in all its forms. He focused his creative efforts beyond the five senses, for, If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.—from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell written between 1790-93, which inspired the title of Aldous Huxley's essay “The Doors of Perception” (1954).

As an artist Blake admired and studied the works of Raphael, Heemskerk, Dürer, and Michelangelo, who would become important influences to the fantastic and at times apocalyptic illustrations he created for his own writings ...