Book review: “Blake: A Biography” by Peter Ackroyd

Laboring in obscurity two centuries ago, William Blake is now considered one of the great figures of English poetry and a brilliant idiosyncratic visual artist.

The story of his life, as told by Peter Ackroyd in his 1996 book Blake: A Biography, stirred me as a poet in a direct, intense and immediate way. During the two months I was reading the book, I was constantly interrupted by the need to craft my own poetry, sparked by Blake’s unconventional, deeply self-driven radiance.

Ackroyd exhibits a masterful knowledge of Blake’s time and place — late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century London — and has produced a deeply researched and deeply felt portrait of the poet-artist.

Over and over throughout the book, I was struck by Blake’s willingness to counter his age, refusing to accept the primacy of logic and reason — indeed, branding logic and reason as falseness, as an illusionary world that masked true wisdom and kept people from finding it in the connection to the deeper and richer transcendent level of human existence.

“A biblical city”

Blake saw spirits, including angels, often.

His wife once reminded him of an earlier apparition. “You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when You were four years old. And he put his head to the window and set you screaming.” And then again, “even when a Child his mother beat him for running in and saying that he saw the Prophet Ezekiel under a Tree in the Fields.”…What Blake saw was not the crepuscular and dirty city of the historian’s imagination, but a city filled with angels and prophets. He saw a biblical city.

He was a man of deep spirituality, but not deep reverence for the institutions of religion. Blake once wrote: “I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination.”

Scientists might seek to plumb the depths of reality through experimentation and hard facts. Blake saw dreams, visions, imaginings as much more real.

 

“I sat for him”

At one point, he said aloud into an empty room a line from someone else’s poetry: “Who can paint an angel?”

And he was answered by a voice, “Michelangelo could.”

“How do you know?” said Blake, and the response was: “I know, for I sat for him. I am the archangel Gabriel.”

Blake looked whence the voice came, and was then aware of a shining shape, with bright wings, who diffused much life. “As I looked, the shape dilated more and more: he waved his hands; the roof of my study opened; he ascended into heaven; he stood in the sun, and beckoning me, moved the universe. An angel of evil could not have done that — it was the arch-angel Gabriel.”

 

“The very curve and cadence of his sentences”

In an era when civilized people were moving away from faith in God and in transcendence, Blake was always, from start to finish, a man of the Bible and of his own reading of the Bible.

His poetry and painting are imbued with biblical motifs and images; the very curve and cadence of his sentences are derived from the Old Testament, while his passages of ritualistic description and denunciation come from the worlds of the great prophets that were heard in the house in Broad Street.

Obstinately, insistently, bull-headedly going forward on the basis of his own beliefs and understanding of existence — to hell with what was “known” and “proven” and “true” — Blake was brave and more than a bit childlike.

Nonetheless, he knew the danger of being such an outsider, and, more than once, he had to pay the price.

To stand so far outside the forces of convention, however, led also to the fear that he might one day be crushed by them. This was the dread that lay within what he called his “perilous adventure.”

 

“Greater than any of them”

Blake had no head for business, and a small circle of art-world friends helped keep him and his wife Catherine alive by steering work his way. Some recognized his artistic genius, even if often perplexed by him. Others, full of themselves and their own careers, found his work too confusing to understand, too individual to be any good.

At the same time, he was forced to rely upon the influence of those same friends to acquire work. It is not surprising, then, to read reports of his anger and bitterness; he knew that he was greater than any of them, and yet he was forced to toil in their shadow and sometimes at their behest.

 

“Cannot see more or less”

Blake was a visionary. He was a prophet.  He was a mystic, like John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, Thérèse of Lisieux, Francis of Assisi and Teresa of Avila.

Is it surprising, either, that he should testify to his great love for the writings of St. Teresa [of Avila]? In a natural and graphic style she recounted her visions of the dead, which were also continual, and explained,

“There is nothing we can do about them; we cannot see more or less of them at will, and we can neither call them up nor banish them by our own efforts…”

To read St. Teresa is to understand something of the mystery of William Blake.

 

“A life of poverty”

Catherine Blake, who shared her husband’s work if not his visions, was ever present, ever supporting him, ever believing in him.

Indeed, he and his wife in this period offer the material for much contemplation — both of them now in late middle age, sharing a life of poverty if not privation, with Catherine attending to the household while at the same time ministering to her husband’s nervous anxieties and fears.

But she also shared his dreams and his inspiration, implicitly believing in the substance of her husband’s visions.

 

Two visionaries

Blake was a Londoner through and through, and, near the end of his book, Ackroyd envisions the older poet-painter moving through the city’s streets where a younger genius was also making his way.

There is a curious irony, too, in the fact that the young Charles Dickens was at this time working in a blacking factory just off the Strand, by Hungerford Market, and there is some pleasure in the thought of these two London visionaries passing one another along the busy thoroughfare.

Dickens was to become the writer of bestselling novels that continue to resonate today. Blake was obscure in his own era and is still far from fashionable today.

Yet, I suspect they would have had much to talk about if they’d stopped on that busy thoroughfare for look behind each other’s eyes.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

7.20.26