On William Blake论英国浪漫主义诗人威廉·布莱克

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Abstract:

Nowadays , William Blake is often regarded as a symbolist and mystic, and he has exerted a great influence on 20^th century writers. No poet in the 18^th century who wrote before the publication of Lyrical Ballads broke so completely with neoclassicism as did Blake. His life, however, was uneventful, and his mystical turn of thought alienated a possible audience. In the article the author presents us with his life and main works and some connection between them to show his literary achievements .

Of all the romantic poets of the 18^th century, Blake is the most independent and the most original. In his earliest work, he seems to go back to the Elizabethan song writers for his models; but for greater part of his life he was the poet of inspiration alone, following no man’s lead, and obeying no voice but that which he heard in his own mystic soul. Though the most extraordinary literary genius of his age , he had practically no influence upon it. Indeed, we hardly yet understand this poet of pure fancy, this mystic, this transcendental madam, who remained to the end of his busy life an incomprehensible child.

Blake, the son of a London haberdasher, was a strange, imaginative child, whose soul was more at home with brooks and flowers and fairies than with the crowd of the city streets. Beyond learning to read and write, he received no education. His only formal education was in art at the age of 10 he entered a drawing school and later studied for a time at the school of the Royal Academy of Arts. At 14 he apprenticed for seven years to a well-known engraver, James Basire , read widely in his free time, and began to try his hand at poetry. At 24 he married Catherine Boucher, daughter of a market gardener. She was then illiterate, but Blake taught her to read and to help him in his engraving and printing. In the early and somewhat sentimentalized biographies, Catherine is represented as an ideal wife for an unorthodox and impecunious genius. Blake, however , must have been a trying domestic partner, and his vehement attacks on the torment caused by a possessive, jealous female will, which reached their height in 1793, and remained prominent in his writing for another decade, probably reflect a troubled period at home.

The Blakes for a time enjoyed a moderate prosperity while Blake gave drawing lessons, illustrated books, and engraved designs made by other artists. When the demand for his work slackened, Blake in 1800 move to a cottage at Felpham, on the Sussex seacoast, under the patronage of the wealthy poetaster, biographer, and amateur of the arts, William Hayley, who with the best of narrow intention tried to transform Blake into a conventional artist and breadwinner. But the caged eagle soon rebelled. Hayley, Blake wrote,” is the Enemy of my Spiritual Life while he pretends to be the friend of my Corporeal.”

At Felpham in 1803 occurred an event that left a permanent mark on Blake’s mind and art. He had an altercation with one John Schofield, a private in the Royal Dragoons. Blake ordered the soldier out of his garden and, when the soldier replied with threats and curses against Blake and his wife, pushed him the fifty yards to the inn where he was quartered. Sochofield brought charge that Blake had uttered seditious statements about King and country. Since England was at war with France, sedition was a hanging offence. Blake was acquitted; an event , according to a newspaper account, “ Which so gratified the auditory that the court was thrown into an uproar by their noisy exultations”. Nevertheless Scholfield, his fellow-soldier Cock, and other participants in the trial haunted Blake’s imagination and were enlarged to demonic characters who play a sinister role in Jerusalem. The event exacerbated Blake’s sense that ominous forces were at work in the contemporary world and led him to complicate the symbolic obliquities by which he veiled the unorthodoxy of his religious and moral opinions, as well as the radicalism of the many allusions to contemporary affairs that he worked into his poems.

 After three years at Felpham , Plake moved back to London, determined to follow his “Devine Vision” though it meant a life of isolation, misunderstanding , and poverty . When his one great bid for pubic recognition, a one-man show put on in1809, proved a total failure, Blake passed into almost complete obscurity. Only when he was in his sixties did he finally attract a small but devoted group of young painters who served as an audience for his work and his talk. Blake’s old age was serene, self-confident, and joyous, largely free from the bursts of irascibility with which he had earlier responded to the shallowness and blindness of the English public. He died in his seventieth year.

 His earliest poems are contained in Poetical Sketches, published in 1783 at the expense of his friends, Flaxman and Mrs .Mathew. In 1789 he engraved and published his Songs of Innocence, in which he first showed the musical cast of his mind. Their underlying theme is the all-pervading presence of divine and sympathy, even in trouble and sorrow. The Book of Thel appeared in the same year, and its theme is similar: the maiden Thel laments the vanity and transience of life, and is answered by the lily, the cloud, the worm, and the clod; they explain the principle of mutual self-sacrifice and that death means a new birth. Tiriel belongs to the years 1788-1789. It is the story of a tyrant and its rebellion children, the symbolic meaning of which is obscure. In 1790 Blake engraved his principle prose work, the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which, with vigorous satire and telling apologue, he takes up his revolutionary position, of which the main features are the denial of the reality of matter, the denial of eternal punishment, and the denial of authority. In The French Revolution(1791), America(1793), and The Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), his attitude of revolt against authority is further developed. He creats a mythology of his own, with Urizen, the deviser of moral codes, and Orc, the arch-rebel, for central figures. The Songs of Experience(1794) are in marked contrast with the Songs of Innocence. The brightness of the earlier work gives place to a sense of gloom and mystery, and of the power of evil. We find again a protest against restrictive codes and an exaltation of the spirit of love. The Songs of Experience include the famous “Tiger! Toger! burning bright”. In The Book of Urizen(1794), The Book of Ahania, The Book of Los (1795), Black pursues, in mythological form, his exposure of the errors of the moral code. By an inversion of the Miltonic story, it is Urizen, the author of moral law, who is expelled from the adobde of the Eternals, and obtains control over the human world. In Europe(1794) and The Song of Los (1795), Enitharmon is the giver of restrictive morality, on behalf of Urizen, to the sons of men; Los, a changing and perplexing character, appears to be the personification of time, a champion of light, but held in bondage; Orc rises in rebellion, a symbol of the French Revolution. In Vala (1797), subsequently in great part re-written and re-named The Four Zoas, the symbolism is exceptionally difficult to follow, but we still have the opposition of Urizen and Orc, representing authority and anarchy; the condemnation of the oppressive code of morality; the ultimate triumph of Orc and of Liberty . In the later version (the Four Zoas) there is a new element, the revelation of forgiveness through Jesus Christ. In 1804 Blake began to engrave his final symbolic works, Milton and Jerusalem. Milton returned from eternity to correct the error to which he had given currency, and enters into Blake, who preaches the doctrine of Jesus , of  self –sacrifice and forgiveness. In Jerusalem we have expounded Blake’s theory of Imagination, “the real and eternal world of which the Vegetable University is but a faint shadow”, ”the world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body.” In The Ghost of Albel (1882), a short dramatic dialogue, Blake, referring to Byron’s Cain, combats the view that the curse of Cain was uttered by Jehovah, and attributes it to Satan. His later minor poems include some beautiful lyrics, such as The Morning and The Land of Dreams; also the fragmentary The Everlasting Gospel, his own interpretation of the Gospel of Christ.

  Blake made, and sometimes engraved, designs in illustration of many works besides his own poems, notably Young’s Night Thoughts , Blair’s Grave, Gray’s Poems, the Book of Job, and the Divina Commedia, designs which reveal his greatness as an artist.

    In summary, in his works we can find Blake’s sympathy with the French Revolution, his hatred for 18^th century conformity and social institution, his attitude of revolt against authority, and his strong protest against restrictive cods. His earlier poems have the clarity of a sun-lit spring, the simplicity of a child’s vocabulary, the connotation of the innocence of the spirit and the beauty of wonderful imagery. But his later poems, esp. the poems in prophetic books are mystical and difficult to understand. There are marvelous flashes of imagery illuminating profound truths, but the elaborately fabricated mythology I soften too obscure to follow.  Blake’s [poetry is an odd mixture of simplicity with profoundity, and innocence with experience. He also had the incomparable gift of expressing the profoundest ideas in the simplest ideas.

Bibliography          

1. Wang Peilan &Ma Qian ,1995 A Brief History of English Literature with Selected Readings  Northeast Normal University Press

2. Wu Weiren,1993, History and Anthology of English Literature Volume 1 Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press

3. Sound and Sense An Introduction to Poetry   Laurence Perrine 7th edition USA

4. Dorothy Eagle,1979, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature

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