Background: William Blake

Thanks to an Instagram post by musician, poet, and writer Patti Smith, I was made aware that the birthday of English poet William Blake happened several days ago. Just as Blake has had no small influence on English and American poetry, he has had no small influence on my poetry.

So as a way of wishing his ghost a happy belated birthday on November 28, 1757, I thought it was worth saying a few words about his art. More than any of the other classic poets of English literature, Blake seemed possessed of a mission. His muse bent him toward a need that he perceived in his culture, an imperative need to be free of oppressive institutions and learn from nature about the true nature of man.

William Blake was a mystic from his childhood forward, and there are many stories, both true and legendary, about Blake’s visions and prophecies. Blake praised the revolutions in America and France and advocated the overthrow of the monarchy in England. He was also a fierce critic of organized religion, believing that when free of a repressive moral code, man found God everywhere.

Blake lived in a world of stark contrasts and those are reflected in his poems. He was a radical, but he depended greatly on Biblical imagery and the Christian belief of redemption from a fallen state for the development of works he wrote later in life, such as Jerusalem and The Four Zoas.

Blake’s marriage was a happy one, but childless. He adored children and tended to idolize them in his poems. Among his most enduring works are Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. I read these two when I was a young poet, and they had a profound impact on me. I still feel the presence of “Echoing Green” in many of my poems, as well as the contrast of life in the natural world with life in the urban.

More than his particular views, many of which I think are exaggerations because of their reactionary origins, it is the courage of Blake’s poetry that was so significant to me as a young poet. Blake summons an urgency not just to impress but to change the heart of the reader, and he calls poets in succeeding ages to do the same.

His “Introduction” poem to Songs of Experience is still a kind of marching order for me. And while the poem is addressed to the reader, there are implied instructions for the poet.

“Hear the voice of the Bard!” Blake writes, and that demand means that the bard must have something to say. I don’t know if Bob Dylan (who is another influential poet to me) was informed by this when he wrote “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” but his poetic impulse is similar to what Blake expresses in the following lines:

Who Past, Present, & Future sees
Whose ears have heard,
The Holy Word,
That walked among the ancient trees.

What Blake writes as a four-line recommendation of the “bard,” Dylan expands into a sermon from the “blue-eyed son” about what he sees, hears, and calls others to do. It is a merging of scriptural allusion, mystical experience, yearning for the natural world, and clear-eyed commentary on the human condition.

I suppose that whether Dylan was consciously influenced by Blake or not hardly matters. There is a straight line of descent from one poet to the other through a shared, and possibly intuited understanding of what the poet should do and the power that the poet has in words, or “the Holy Word.”

Blake connects the power of the poet, controlling “the starry pole” and renewing the “fallen fallen light,” to the fundamental movement of the earth from day to night and night to day. In Blake’s conception, the spiritual life of humans depends, at least in part, on harmony with and understanding of the natural world in which they live.

Blake grew up under a father and mother whose parenting approach seems to have been laissez-faire, so I’ve always thought that the child in “The School Boy,” the final poem of Songs of Experience, is a stand-in for Blake. The schoolboy would rather sing with the lark than be criticized and smothered “under a cruel eye outworn.”

Blake found evil any institution that caused a child to “droop his tender wing,/ and forget his youthful spring” or that stood in the way of a child who, like a bird, is “born for joy.” The preservation of innocence, especially in children, gave his poetry a fighting edge that was at the heart of his mission.

I’ve hardly scratched the surface of William Blake’s work either in this article or in my own reading. As a poet (and painter and engraver), Blake was shockingly prolific. He lived in a time when a great paradigm shift was taking place in what people thought of governments and how they believed they could live, and this seems to have been a direct impetus for the works he created.

As for me, I continue to carry with me the imprint of the imagery of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Blake’s example of a poet writing about larger stuff than himself is a charge that I am more and more taking to heart.