What makes william blake unique

His lack of commercial success meant that Blake lived his life in relative poverty, a life in thrall to a highly individual, sometimes iconoclastic, imaginative vision. Through his prints, paintings, and poems, Blake constructed a mythical universe of an intricacy and depth to match Dante's Divine Comedy , but which, liked Dante's, bore the imprint of contemporary culture and politics.

When Blake died, in a small house in London in , he was poor and somewhat anonymous; today, we can recognize him as a prototype for the avant-garde artists of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whose creative spirit stands at odds with the prevailing mood of their culture.

William Blake was born in Soho, London, into a respectable working-class family. His father James sold stockings and gloves for a living, while his mother, Catherine Hermitage, looked after the couple's seven children, two of whom died in infancy.

William, a strong-willed boy and an evident prodigy from a young age, often absconded from school to wander through the streets of London, or spent his time copying drawings of Greek antiquities; moreover, inspired by the work of Raphael and Michelangelo, he also developed an early fascination with poetry.

Though his childhood was peaceful and pleasant, William began experiencing visions at the age of eight, claiming to see angels on trees, or wings that looked like stars. Though troubled by his stories, Blake's parents supported his artistic ambitions, enrolling him when he was ten at the Henry Par drawing academy, then a well-regarded preparatory school for young artists.

Songs of Innocence and Experience , a collection of poems written and illustrated by Blake, demonstrates his equal mastery of poetry and art. Blake printed the collection himself, using an innovative technique which he called 'illuminated printing: first, printing plates were produced by adding text and image - back-to-front, and simultaneously - to copper sheets, using an ink impervious to the nitric acid which was then used to erode the spaces between the lines.

After an initial printing, detail was added to individual editions of the book using watercolors. Prone as he was to visions, Blake claimed that this method had been suggested to him by the spirit of his dead brother, Robert. Songs of Innocence was initially published on its own in Its partner-work, Songs of Experience , followed in in the wake of the French Revolution, the more worldly and troubling themes of this second volume reflecting Blake's increasing engagement with the politically turbulent era.

The cover of Songs of Innocence and Experience includes the subtitle "The Two Contrary States of the Human Soul," a reference to the opposing essences which Blake took to animate the universe, depicted throughout the collection through a range of contrasting images and tropes. Beneath this caption are a man and woman, presumably Adam and Eve, whose bodies mirror each other, but are connected by Adam's leg, another indication of the dualities at work in the book.

The use of vibrant color, and the intensity and fluidity of Blake's lines, creates a sense of drama complemented by the figures' anguished appearance. At the same time, the dance-like orientation of their bodies creates an almost childlike sense of play, which jars with the lofty nature of the project. Unappreciated during his lifetime, Blake's illuminated books are now ranked amongst the greatest achievements of Romantic art.

They indicate his artisanal approach to his craft - influential on the 'cottage industries' of subsequent printer-poets such as William Morris - and his hatred of the printing press and mechanization in general. The question underlying this collection is how a benevolent God could allow space for both good and evil - or rather, innocence and experience - in the universe, these two necessary and opposing forces summed up by the contrasting images of the lamb and "the tyger", the subjects of the two best-known poems in the sequence.

The Ancient of Days , one of Blake's most recognizable works, portrays a bearded, godlike figure kneeling on a flaming disk, measuring out a dark void with a golden compass.

This figure is Urizen, a fictional deity invented by Blake who forms parts of the artist's complex mythology, embodying the spirit of reason and law: two concepts with a very vexed position in Blake's moral universe. Urizen features as a character in several of Blake's illuminated long poems, including Europe: A Prophecy , for which this illustration was created. There, and here, Urizen is a repressive force, impeding the positive power of imagination.

This piece can thus be read in light of a famous line from another of Blake's long works, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell : "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

He prized imagination above all else, describing it not as "a state" but as the essence of "human existence itself. This is also clear from the annotated version of Sir Joshua Reynold's Discourses on Art which he produced around this time. Blake was highly critical of Reynolds, an older and more established artist who, as President of the Royal Academy of Arts, embodied what Blake saw as the formulaic and stultifying ideals of the academy; his teeming marginalia to Reynold's treatise serves in some ways as a conscious affront to these ideals.

The Ancient of Days sums up something of the spirit Blake was opposing, but also of the spirit he was endorsing. It is also known to have been one of his favorite images, an example of his early work, but also one of his last works, as he painted a copy of it in bed shortly before his death. This piece, like Songs of Innocence and Experience , was made using Blake's illuminated printing technique.

It seems to portray two cherubim, one of whom holds a baby, on white horses in a darkened sky, jumping over a prostrated female figure. Blake's use of blues and greens, contrasting with the whites of the figures, grants the work a nocturnal, dreamlike quality. Indeed, some scholars have questioned the extent to which the piece draws on Shakespeare's verse, suggesting instead that it might depict figures from Blake's own imaginative pantheon, as its visionary intensity seems to imply.

The figure turning away from the viewer might be the god Urizen, for example, the face leaning down from the horse that of Los, an oppositional force to Urizen but also his prophet on earth, who has taken on the female form of Pity - often embodied in the character of his partner, Enitharmion - to enact Urizen's will. The woman below might be Eve, fulfilling the biblical prophecy that "in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children" by generating the miniaturized male figure cradled in Los's arms.

By this reading, Pity represents the fall of man, in particular the moment when he becomes aware of his sexuality, and his subjugation to God. Through mythological and literary-inspired works such as Pity , Blake would exert an immense influence on the course of post-Romantic art, including on the Pre-Raphaelites, who often drew on literary and Shakespearean themes, as in John Everett Millais's Ophelia and John William Waterhouse's Miranda The hallucinatory quality of works such as Pity , meanwhile, along with their apparent deep allegorical significance, would have a profound effect on movements such as Symbolism and Surrealism.

Relief etching, printed in color and finished with pen and ink and watercolor - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In this, perhaps Blake's most famous visual artwork, the mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton is shown drawing on a scroll on the ground with a large compass.

He sits on a rock surrounded by darkness, hunched over and entirely consumed by his thoughts. This engraving was developed from the tenth plate of Blake's early illustrated treatise There is No Natural Religion , which shows a man kneeling on the floor with a compass and features the caption "He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only". For Blake, Newton was the living embodiment of rationality and scientific enquiry, a mode of intelligence which he saw as reductive, sterile, and ultimately blinding.

Isaac Newton is clearly a critical visual allegory, therefore, the sharp angles and straight lines used to mark out Newton's body emphasizing the repressive spirit of reason, while the organic textures of the rock, apparently covered in algae and living organisms, represent the world of nature, where the spirit of human imagination finds its true mirror.

The deep, consuming black surrounding Newton, generally taken to represent the bottom of the sea or outer space, indicates his ignorance of this world, his distance from the Platonic light of truth. The compass is a symbol of geometry and rational order, a tool and emblem of the stultifying materialism of the Enlightenment.

Blake's scorn for the scientific worldview, which also gave rise to his famous depiction of the god Urizen in The Ancient of Days - another figure who tries to measure out the universe with a compass - is summed up by his assertion that "Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death". Blake's Isaac Newton has been the subject of numerous reproductions, homages, and reinterpretations, and the figure of Newton himself is probably Blake's best-known visual image, perhaps because it sums up his creative credo so perfectly.

The image is also famous because it has proved so fascinating to subsequent artists. In , the British pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi created a large number of bronze sculptures inspired by Blake's work, including a huge sculptural homage to Blake's Newton - though both curvier and more machine-like than its predecessor - which now sits outside the British Library in London.

The painting, finished in pen and ink, illustrates a passage from the Bible, a prophecy described in the Gospel of Matthew as having been used by Jesus to advise the faithful on spiritual vigilance, describing how "A trumpeting angel flying overhead signifies that the moment of judgment has arrived".

Blake contrasts the elegant and wise virgins on the left, prepared for the trumpet's call from the angel above, with the foolish virgins on the right, who fall over their feet in agitation and fear.

Hayley hired a lawyer on Blake's behalf, and he was acquitted in January , by which time Blake and Catherine had moved back to London. In , Blake began to write and illustrate Jerusalem , his most ambitious work to date. He also began showing more work at exhibitions including Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims and Satan Calling Up His Legions , but these works were met with silence, and the one published review was absurdly negative; the reviewer called the exhibit a display of "nonsense, unintelligibleness and egregious vanity," and referred to Blake as "an unfortunate lunatic.

Blake was devastated by the review and lack of attention to his works, and, subsequently, he withdrew more and more from any attempt at success. From to , he engraved few plates there is no record of Blake producing any commercial engravings from to He also sank deeper into poverty, obscurity and paranoia. In , however, Blake began sketching a series of "visionary heads," claiming that the historical and imaginary figures that he depicted actually appeared and sat for him.

By , Blake had sketched more than of them, including those of Solomon and Merlin the magician and those included in "The Man Who Built the Pyramids" and "Harold Killed at the Battle of Hastings"; along with the most famous visionary head, that included in Blake's "The Ghost of a Flea. Remaining artistically busy, between and , Blake engraved 21 designs for an illustrated Book of Job from the Bible and Dante's Inferno.

In , he began a series of watercolor illustrations of Dante — a project that would be cut short by Blake's death in In the final years of his life, Blake suffered from recurring bouts of an undiagnosed disease that he called "that sickness to which there is no name. In death, as in life, Blake received short shrift from observers, and obituaries tended to underscore his personal idiosyncrasies at the expense of his artistic accomplishments.

The Literary Chronicle , for example, described him as "one of those ingenious persons Unappreciated in life, Blake has since become a giant in literary and artistic circles, and his visionary approach to art and writing has not only spawned countless, spellbound speculations about Blake, they have inspired a vast array of artists and writers. We strive for accuracy and fairness.

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At the end of the 18th century, poet William Wordsworth helped found the Romantic movement in English literature. He also wrote "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. William Penn was an English Quaker best known for founding the colony of Pennsylvania as a place for religious freedom in America. William Shakespeare, often called England's national poet, is considered the greatest dramatist of all time. That realignment influences how we approach and respond to the works on display, especially those we think we know, such as the often-reproduced colour print known as Albion Rose or Glad Day, whose exuberance adorns a vast inventory of upbeat museum merchandise.

But Blake refuses to be trapped by the geometries of a fallen world and dissolves the fetters of the offending compasses by erasing altogether the circle and square with which Leonardo ensnares his subject, allowing the young boy to step out unshackled into a limitless world. William Blake is at Tate Britain until 2 February If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.

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