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1. Blake Biography William Blake , poet and artist, was born on 28 November 1757 to James Blake, a hosier, and Catherine Hermitage, daughter of a hosier, at 28 Broad Street in Golden Square, London. According to one of his earliest biographers, Tatham, James did not send the young William to school because 'he despised restraints and rules'. Nonetheless, the 12-year-old boy was eventually sent to what was arguably the best drawing school of the time, Pars, where he was apprenticed to James Basire, engraver to the Society of Antiquaries. His tutelage under liberal-minded Basire was a formative experience which helped him to shape his original style but also made his art less accessible to a public accustomed to the softer touch of Bartolozzi. Basire also encouraged his young pupil to draw monuments in Westminster Abbey and other old churches and to sketch scenes from English history, training which may have contributed to the unique perception of history in many of Blake's works, from Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) to Jerusalem (1804).
Indeed, Blake was to attribute his new method of illuminated painting/relief etching to this spiritual dictate when he could not find a publisher for the Songs of Innocence . The verse was written with the designs outlined on copper with impervious acid-resistant fluid after which the remainder of the plate was treated with acid so that the letters and outlines were left prominent as in stereotype to be printed in any tint. Each page was individually detailed and coloured.
2. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
A prose work by W. Blake, etched c. 1790-73, introduced by a short poem. It consists of a sequence of paradoxical aphorisms in which Blake turns conventional morality on its head, claiming that man does not consist of the duality of Soul = Reason and Body = Evil, but that "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul...Energy is the only life, and is from the Body...Energy is Eternal Delight." He proceeds to claim that Milton's Satan was truly his Messiah, and that Milton "was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it", and to produce a series of "Proverbs of Hell" ("Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires" being one of the most notorious), which also celebrate the holiness of the natural world. He then moves to a sequence of visionary encounters with angels and prophets, in the course of which he dismisses the writings of Swedenborg (whom he had greatly admired), accusing him of not having conversed sufficiently with Devils but only with Angels, and ends with an evocation of an Angel turned Devil. G. B. Shaw, who greatly admired Blake, was much influenced by his doctrine of contraries. 3.The Two Concepts for understanding The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Two concepts are key to understanding The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Blake¡¯s idiosyncratic form of Christianity. First, as articulated in his classic Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), is the notion of ¡°contraries,¡± or opposing forces, similar to the Daoist notion of yin and yang. Blake saw all life as a necessary interplay of opposites. ¡°The Argument¡± of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell applies this notion of the contraries to orthodox Christian dogma: As Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy: ¡°Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.¡± For Blake any system, religious or philosophical, which tries to give preference to one half of such a dichotomy does not admit the complexity and unity of human experience and is destined to failure. Such failure leads to oppression and tyranny by the ¡°elect¡± half of the dichotomy, which turns its opposite, to use Calvinist jargon, into the ¡°reprobate.¡± The second key concept springs from the first. In the personal mythology presented in his prophetic works, Blake satirizes the notion of the Old Testament Jehovah, as refracted through Enlightenment thought, as ¡°Urizen¡± (often seen as homophone for ¡°Your Reason¡±). Blake rejects the notion of God as a ruthless, rule-making punisher who is guided by an impersonal, stony rationalism. Blake excoriated the Christianity of his day, both Protestant and Catholic, as a form of primitive idol worship to this ¡°Old Nobodaddy¡± with his rules and regulations, rewards and punishments. He considered the Church of England an arm of state tyranny, offering an ideological framework for un-Christian practices ranging from child labor to slavery. Even more than the physical abuses of which the Church washed its hand, Blake deemed the mental enslavement of its believers as its ultimate corrupting influence. For Blake, imagination, and not rationality or intellect, is the central faculty of mind that unites the human with the creativity of the divine. Blake identified this creative imagination with the notion of the Logos, or Word made Flesh, in the divine humanity of Jesus Christ. Several of the ¡°Proverbs of Hell¡± reinforce the primacy of imagination and energy: ¡°What is now prov¡¯d, was once only imagined¡± and ¡°The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.¡± The first indicates that the creative act begins with an imaginative concept; the second suggests that wisdom is not a matter of following the straight and narrow rationalistic guides but the impulses of creative energy. Blake¡¯s faith in the creative imagination as the link between the divine and the human leads him to satirize what he perceived as the rational materialism underpinning Enlightenment Christianity. Five sections of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell are titled ¡°A Memorable Fancy.¡± Blake uses sarcastically the term ¡°Fancy¡± (the term used by John Milton and eighteenth century poets for ¡°imagination¡±). The first of these describes Blake as ¡°walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity¡±; a ¡°mighty Devil¡± appears and, just as Blake used corrosives in his engraving process, inscribes the following couplet on a plutonian mountainside: How do you know but ev¡¯ry Bird that cuts the airy way,Is an immense World of Delight, clos¡¯d by your senses five? Unlike the biblical Jehovah who inscribes his Ten Commandments for Moses, Blake¡¯s Devil is more concerned about imagination than ethics. The ¡°fires of hell¡± burn away the constricting limitations of the material world as perceived by the five senses. Themes: Christian Themes Blake, whose later works belie easy identification with any religious system, has been cautiously interpreted as a Gnostic Christian. However, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, an early work, would seem to fit such a label. The very title indicates a quest for mystical unity capable of transcending the apparent dualism of the body and soul, physical and metaphysical worlds. Also, his identification with the devils in the work conforms to the Gnostic belief that a demiurge rather than the transcendent godhead was responsible for creating the material world. In the work¡¯s second ¡°Memorable Fancy,¡± Blake ¡°dines¡± with Ezekial and Isaiah, who sound more like Gnostic seekers than Old Testament prophets. When Blake asks them to explain how God spoke to them, the latter responds: ¡°I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover¡¯d the infinite in everything, and as I was then persuaded, and remain confirm¡¯d, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.¡± The section ends with a famous epigram later borrowed by Aldous Huxley for the title of his influential book on hallucinatory mescaline and then adopted by the 1960¡¯s rock group The Doors: If the doors of perception were cleansed everything 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. While Blake seems to undertake the Gnostic¡¯s quest for hidden knowledge, he does not assume the Gnostic denial of the reality of the body or physical world. Thus his search for the infinite comes not through denial of the senses but by an expansion of them. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell also sketches Blake¡¯s unusual, if not heterodox, vision of Jesus Christ. Blake sees Christ as an incarnation of the eternal Logos or Word, but one that is at odds with a biblical literalism symbolized by the Ten Commandments. In the fifth ¡°Memorable Fancy¡± Blake presents a dialogue between an angel and a devil regarding Jesus¡¯ adherence to Old Testament law. After a literalistic angel argues that God and Jesus are one in the law, a subtle devil responds that Jesus broke many of the Ten Commandments, including ignoring the Sabbath and protecting the woman caught in adultery. The devil concludes: ¡°Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.¡±
 
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