Songs of Experience (Paperback)

The son of a haberdasher, Blake attended drawing school as a boy and later studied at the Royal Academy of the Arts. He was apprenticed at 14 to an engraver and spent seven years there, during which time, in addition to perfecting his art, he began to read extensively, and to write poetry. When he was 24, he married the illiterate daughter of a market gardener; he taught her to read and assist him in his studio. The two had no children, and their marriage was turbulent, though Blake's last drawing was of his wife's face. In 1800 he was taken under the wing of a wealthy patron of the arts, William Hayley, whose conventional taste led Blake, rather ungratefully, to term him "the enemy of my Spiritual Life." In 1803, unjustly accused of sedition against the king, Blake was tried and acquitted; the experience left a permanent mark on his imagination, and he became increasingly preoccupied with his vision of the world as an arena in which demonic forces constantly struggle to undermine the Good. Blake passed most of his life in poverty and obscurity, doggedly adhering to his unpopular beliefs. Only in his old age did he enjoy any success, when he became a kind of cult favorite with the younger painters in the London art world. It is said that he died with a pencil in his hand. In the mid-19th century, long after his death, he was rediscovered, chiefly by the Pre-Raphaelite artists and poets. Blake gave up poetry in his 60s to produce only pictorial art, but his great contribution as a poet was his prophetic myth-making and his stubborn originality. Perhaps his most famous lyric is "The Tyger" ("Tyger, Tyger, burning bright...") from his "Songs of Innocence and Experience" (1794).