In mid-August London in 1827, a small group of mourners gathered on a hill in the fields just north of the city limits in Bunhill Fields, nicknamed “the hill of bones,” a burial ground for the long-disgraced dead. There, in what was now a cemetery, the English Poor Laws had guaranteed a pauper's funeral for a man who had died five days earlier in his dirty home and was now being lowered into an unknown grave. The man in “Songs of Innocence” would ignite a creative spark in the imagination of a young Maurice Sendak a century later. The man Patti Smith would celebrate is “like a loom, spinning a thread of revelation” – the guiding sun in man's creative universe.
They don't know William Blake (November 28, 1757–August 12, 1827) appreciated his great kindness, his ability to be happy even when he was often depressed and without understanding, “his expression of great pleasure, but it depends on weakness – unless his features are translated into words, then he has an air of inspiration about him.” He was remembered for strange things, such as the koan he recited about Jesus (He alone is God. So am I and so are you.), about successful musicians who held his poverty as proof of his failure (I have my opinions and peace. They exchanged birthrights for cooked food.), about the nature of creativity (A tree that brings tears of joy to others' eyes is just a green thing standing in the way… As a person is, he sees it that way.)
Unseen by his own world, he saw deep into the worlds to come, directing his visions to whatever was nearby. It was not the method that was important, but listening to it as he bent it to his vision of mystery which is a message in itself – a message that we call art: He was an artist, a poet, a philosopher without meaning, an early prophet of panpsychism, a mystic who did not live to solve the mystery but to be happy in it, to write it in verses and verses of stains. sow it in souls for centuries to come.
As an artist, he was determined, his guiding sun. Like Beethoven, with whom he shared a year of death and a stubborn unwillingness to compromise on the vision of art he experienced as life, Blake was determined to do what he wanted to do and do it on his own terms – in a world unfriendly to art and unfriendly to ideals.
There is no greater act of creative courage than this.
So, centuries before the technology existed to prove it, William Blake was the first living thinker of the 1,000 True Fans theory. He knew what we all eventually see, if we are awake and brave enough: that the best way – and the only effective way – to complain about the way things are is to do new and better things, untested and unprecedented things, things that come from the power of creative conviction and drag the existing situation like a wave towards some new place.
Poverty is not a friend of the creative spirit, even for this artist who knew that “Man does not have a separate body from his Soul because what is called the Body is part of the Soul.” To support himself, Blake worked long exhausting hours as an engraver for hire, staring at copper sheets to scratch and carve shapes into them with intricate patterns of dots and lines. “Painting is forever,” muttered a customer who complained that the project was taking too long.
All the while, Blake's mind was in a frenzy and filled with an overwhelming chaos of his ideas. He pressed the plates onto the white paper, watching the ink held in the tiny grooves of the etchings creating stark but soft black and white shapes, alive with light and shadow.
It was great, but it was very hard work – he couldn't make a living by illustrating other people's work, and it didn't leave time for his art. He longed for a different method that would achieve the same result in less time and with less effort.
There is no such face.
So he invented it.
Rather than cutting shapes out of the plates with his sharp metal burin, he painted directly on the copper with a quill or brush dipped in acid-resistant varnish, then acid-washed the plates, peeling off the top layer to reveal the sculptural shape of what he had drawn. An appeal made to chemistry and creative restlessness.
It came to him, he said, like a message from the spirit of his dead brother.
The new approach gave Blake complete creative freedom and full production control. Suddenly, he could combine text and image on a single page, in a single process, that traditional engraving or pasting couldn't do – both required a separate writing surface and a second production pass to set the words.
There was only one challenge to his invention: Because the print was made by pressing the plate onto the page, any text he painted on the plate was printed backwards.
So he learned to write with a mirror.
Suddenly, William Blake had removed himself from the production machine, giving his creative power. He estimates that his new process enabled him to do what he wanted to do at a quarter of the cost. He was one man, creating in his place and with his own hands what usually took whole groups of craftsmen and artisans, each with different training, using different tools, working in different workshops.
Four centuries before, before blogs, before Instagram, before Substack, William Blake had created a private platform where he would share his creative works, just as he wanted them to live.
The magnitude of his creativity is not lost on Blake. In 1793, he composed and printed his own The Prospectuswhich was written “THE COMMUNITY,” in which he declared that he had “invented a method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a more ornamental, uniform, and beautiful manner than any that had ever been found before.” It was nothing less than a creative manifesto to liberate yourself:
The works of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, are attended by saga and poverty and concealment; this was by no means the fault of the Society, but it was due to the neglect of the means of distributing such works as have completely taken over the Intellectual Man. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their books.
[…]
If the method of Printing which unites the Painter and the Poet is something worthy of public attention, as long as it surpasses in excellence all previous methods, the Author is sure of his reward.
In William Blake vs. The world (public library) – the best book on Blake in the seven decades since Alfred Kazin's masterpiece – John Higgs captures how great this was, both as a creative technique and an ethos:
Eighteenth-century printing was a complex business that involved many trade professionals. One person wrote the book, another was responsible for editing it, and a third edited the text. The artist designs the drawings for the engraver to produce, and the printer feeds each page into the press, once for the text and second for the images. Sometimes, these were hand-colored by another professional, and finally the bookseller sold the finished book. Thanks to Blake's new technique, he had the ability to do all these tasks himself. He was a one-man publishing house, writing, designing, printing and coloring his own graphic works. Although he was still in the Georgian era, Blake practiced the “do it yourself” ethos of punk rock.
Here is where a critic or a Silicon Valley entrepreneur might laugh, Now? He died poor. And here is where Blake backs off, as he does in the book, I must forgive if I had earthly glory, because any natural glory a man has greatly detracts from his spiritual glory.
Indeed, because he was his standard, because he wanted to do exactly what he wanted to do, it was enough for him that a few dedicated followers became his collectors and he commissioned the work he was inspired to do. It was almost enough to live on. And it wasn't what he lived for. (Centuries later, this ethos – which I believe is the natural state of the creative spirit – still raises eyebrows as radicalism.)
In the act of this choice, he was imitating a kind of moral beauty that reaches beyond art, to life itself – the unwillingness to accept the limitations imposed on any present moment by the impulse of the past, the winged determination to do whatever is necessary to overcome them, which begins with a new way of seeing: seeing limitations and seeing other possibilities. Because Changing an Eye changes everything.
Higgs writes:
Blake's politics… were in his creations. He may have had great sympathy for the poor, but he did not spend his days working to improve their condition. Instead, he believed that thought was a necessary tool for social development, and… he would do more to liberate people than lobbying or protesting. Doing this would require sincerity, self-belief, and effort.
It is here that we find Blake's most powerful political speech. True politics is not an opinion you can discuss, but an attitude about your relationship with the world that is used in your daily life. Your politics is not what you say you believe. It is not a collection of ideas that you relate to, or look to for personal validation of your own goodness as a person. Your politics are expressed in the decisions you make, the way you treat other people, and the actions you take. This is where the hypocrisy and vanity come in, as the reality of your politics is reflected in the countless decisions you make every day. Who you work for, whether you volunteer for charity, whether you own a property, whether you eat meat, the extent to which you pursue money and consumer goods – these are the kinds of decisions where our true politics are expressed… Blake needed a record sales job to keep a roof over his head. But he also needed to be comfortable with giving up when it came to his work. He produced his art as a person against each rule, not asking for permission, not answering to anyone.
Blake himself put it well and bluntly:
There cannot be more than two or three great Painters or Poets in any Age or Country; and these, in the corrupt state of Society, are easily removed, but not easily prevented.
For an uncompromising musical companion, revisit the story of how Beethoven composed “Ode to Joy,” then enjoy Esperanza Spalding's delightful interpretation of Blake's iconic poem “The Fly” and this classic picture book celebrating his extraordinary legacy.
