“The eternal loom spins the immaculate word. The word forms the pulp and sinew of innocence… William Blake never let go of the loom’s golden skein… He was the loom’s loom, spinnin…
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees,”William Blake (November 28, 1757–August 12, 1827) wrote in his most beautiful letter — a soaring defense of the imagination. A genius both tragic and transcendent, Blake was among humanity’s deepest and farthest seers — of truth, of beauty, of the universe in a grain of sand, of the human condition in a fly. His poetry and art went on to influence generations of creators as varied as Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak, who built his own singular sensibility upon a Blakean foundation, to Allen Ginsberg, who so cherished Blake that he recorded a strange and wonderful LP singing Blake’s Songs of Innocence with an electric orchestra.
Art by William Blake for a rare 1808 edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost
But no artist in our time, and possibly none in all of time, has been a more spirited exponent of Blake’s enduring genius than Patti Smith.
Smith discovered Blake as a girl, after her mother purchased for her at a church bazaar a handsome 1927 edition of his Songs of Innocence, faithful to the 1789 original, which Blake printed and illuminated himself. Mesmerized by the exquisite marriage of text and image, the young Patti spent hours deciphering Blake’s calligraphy and absorbing every detail of his rich, sensitive illustrations. She returned to him again and again throughout her life, holding him up as consolation for the strife of struggling artists and eventually honoring him in a song. When her dear friend and mentor Allen Ginsberg fell mortally ill, she fetched a volume of Blake bound in blood-red leather from his library — a copy in which, she recalls, “each poem was deeply annotated in Allen’s hand, just as Blake had annotated Milton” — and read it by his dying bedside.
In the past few years, we’ve become increasingly used to hearing William Blake’s poetry being used to sell cars or seeing his art being used to sell Dr Martens. What is perhaps his most famous piece of work, the stanzas beginning ‘And did those feet’ from the Preface to the epic illuminated book Milton a Poem, is more likely to be heard at Last Night of the Proms, cricket matches, or jubilee celebrations.What is most surprising about this appropriation by royalty and the commercial establishment is that Blake publicly inveighed against ‘One King, one God, one Law’ and privately observed that ‘Every Body hates a King’, while denouncing in Milton the ‘ignorant Hirelings’ who demeaned art with their ‘expensive advertizing boasts’. George Orwell thought that there was more understanding of the nature of capitalism in the Song of Experience, ‘London’, than in most political writing, and throughout his life Blake repeatedly attacked a world which privileged the rich while subjecting the poor to war and degradation.
Blake was born during the Seven Years’ War, which has been described as perhaps the first global war, involving most European nations in conflict across the continents. His own political awakening, however, came during his years as an apprentice to the engraver James Basire. The American War of Independence served as a lightning rod for domestic discontent with the administrations of Lord North and George III at this time, and Blake was caught up in 1780’s Gordon Riots—anti-Catholic protests motivated by Lord George Gordon, head of the Protestant Association, which transformed into more violent assaults against institutions of property and repression in the capital. Newgate Prison was broken into, and a proclamation daubed on the walls that the inmates had been freed by the authority of ‘His Majesty, King Mob’.
The title page of America a Prophecy. (Wikimedia Commons)
Opposition to the Establishment, then, was something with which Blake was familiar during his teens, and there are echoes of rather conventional declamations against tyranny in his first collection, Poetical Sketches. As with many writers, artists, and thinkers of his generation, however, it was the events of the French Revolution that radicalised Blake. His first true biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, wrote that Blake had worn the red bonnet of liberty in support of the Revolution.
A great deal of his political education during this period came from his associations with the publisher Joseph Johnson. Johnson’s circle included Henry Fuseli, William Godwin, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft, hosting legendary soirées at which his guests would discuss a wide range of the political and social events of the day. The 1790s saw Johnson publish more political works, including distributing a pamphlet by Gilbert Wakefield that criticised an address by the Bishop of Llandaff that supported the privileges of the wealthy, for which he was imprisoned.
It was Johnson’s trial that led Blake to write privately that ‘To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life’. Johnson and Blake had a working relationship that spanned two decades, with Johnson regularly hiring Blake to furnish engravings for many of his authors—although he refused to publish Blake’s euphoric The French Revolution, just as he turned away Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. Nonetheless, it was through his associations with figures such as Godwin, Paine, and—most of all—Wollstonecraft that Blake developed a more radical political vision.
In works such as America a Prophecy and Europe a Prophecy, Blake celebrated the events of the American and French revolutions, but the true originality of this emerging vision is evident in works like Visions of the Daughters of Albion and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In Visions, Blake is one of the first writers to enthusiastically take up Wollstonecraft’s call to vindicate the rights of women, attacking rape culture and writing some of his most powerful poetry through the voice of his character Oothoon, who refuses to accept the brutal status accorded her as a woman and a slave.
It’s in The Marriage, however, that Blake most completely turned the world upside down, declaring himself on the side of the devils and against angels and a vision of God that he increasingly associated with Urizen, the false creator of this world. Blake was an intensely religious writer, but these views were highly heretical: ‘All deities,’ The Marriage observed, ‘reside in the human breast’, the creations of poets and artists to challenge and transform the world.
By the end of the century, as Britain became mired ever more deeply in war with France, Blake’s clear and overt radicalism made London a dangerous place. It was with some relief, then, that his friends welcomed a new arrangement in 1800 that saw him and his wife, Catherine, leave London for the only time in their life, for the coastal village of Felpham in Sussex, where they would work with a new patron, William Hayley. Relations with Hayley soured, however, and their venture on the shores of the ocean ended in disaster.
On 12 August 1803, Blake became involved in an argument with a soldier, John Scolfield, in which he was reported to have said ‘Damn the King’. Arrested and tried for sedition, Blake was found innocent, but the event scarred him and over the next decade he fell into increasing poverty. As he lamented in one of his personal poems: ‘O why was I born with a different Face / Why was I not born like this Envious Race?’
In his later works, Milton a Poem and Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion, Blake’s art and writing becomes both increasingly beautiful and more obscure. Although there was a tendency to view this complexity as a withdrawal from the world, both religiously and politically, Blake’s vision remained intensely radical. In Jerusalem, Blake’s alter ego, Los, walks through London, witnessing everywhere the appalling effects of continuing war on the poor and downtrodden in the city:
He came down from Highgate thro Hackney & Holloway towards London
Till he came to old Stratford & thence to Stepney & the Isle
Of Leuthas Dogs, thence thro the narrows of the Rivers side
And saw every minute particular, the jewels of Albion, running down
The kennels of the streets & lanes as if they were abhorrd.
Blake’s continuing commitment to the transformation of Albion, his preferred name for Britain in his later works, is evident in his most famous—and often most misunderstood—poem, most commonly known as the hymn ‘Jerusalem’. Detached from its Preface, and later set to music by Hubert Parry to raise the morale of Britons during the First World War, Blake’s poem is an attack on the ‘Hirelings’ he sees in the camps, court, and universities who would if they could ‘for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War’. By 1916, a group of editors and writers had determined that a poem which criticised the fall of Albion into error and violence was instead a wholehearted celebration of England—but for Blake, building Jerusalem meant rejecting the newly emerging military-industrial complex that ground down the bodies and souls of ‘the jewels of Albion’ as fodder for their wars of colonialism.
Blake’s ‘The Dance of Albion (Day of Joy)’ c.1795. (Wikimedia Commons)
Singing ‘Jerusalem’ while waving the Union Jack may have become an all-too familiar image, especially after it became embedded in Last Night of the Proms. Even when Parry was composing his music, however, others took a different approach. The writer and social campaigner Upton Sinclair included the poem in his anthology Cry for Justice, while Clement Attlee quoted Blake’s words favourably in his early book The Social Worker. Building Jerusalem would become Attlee’s guiding principle after the Second World War, when a Labour administration would quite literally build a new nation through the establishment of the NHS and the welfare state.
From the perspective of John Scolfield, Blake was a traitor—and yet into the twenty-first century it is the poet rather than the soldier who has inspired generations of artists and writers, whether the anarchic bluster of Rooster Byron in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem or new settings of the poem by the singer Susheela Raman. 265 years after Blake’s birth, that radical vision remains more important than ever.
Could Allen Ginsberg have written “Howl” without him?
By Michael Glover
The great painter William Blake (1757-1827) traveled far in the realms of gold, to borrow a phrase from John Keats, but much less far in the body. (He lived in various parts of London for all but a little more than three years of his relatively long life.)
So, where did he go when he was not actually using his legs? According to Blake himself, the only known authority, he regularly conversed with Sophocles, Aristotle, and Jesus. And then there were the angels, many of whom were also his fast friends. He had his first angelic conversations on Peckham Rye, a glorious park, still thoroughly angelic in appearance and character, in south London. Did anyone mind?
When asked after his death whether she had any complaints about his behavior, Blake’s long-suffering wife Catherine tentatively mentioned an innate predisposition to spend a little too much time “in paradise.”
“I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company,” she said
In recent years, Blake’s works have traveled quite far physically through the galleries of Tate Britain, the principal earthly depository of his delicate works in the United Kingdom. This spring, the London museum had a major re-hang. The last time this had happened was in 2013, under Penelope Curtis, its last director. That year, a dedicated Blake Room was created inside the Clore Gallery. The extension, which opened in 1987, was created to show off prized works from the enormous J. M. W. Turner bequest. Blake had his own little room carved out of it to show off a choice selection of his paintings and prints.
William Blake, “Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils” (circa 1826)
The walls were royal blue. The space was very dimly lit because works by Blake are so fragile and so light-sensitive. His pioneering use of mixed media makes them very unstable. They are often not on show for very long.
Was Blake thoroughly embedded in the 18th and 19th centuries? Only partially.
His prints, and especially those commissioned by clients, are often thoroughly neo-classical in feel and execution. But when he was let loose to make works of his own imaginings, he was a wild thing, a freelance mythologizer, a blazing forerunner of psychedelia.
This spring the Blake Room of 2013 disappeared from amongst the Turners, and 15 Blakes did a flit to the other side of Tate Britain, in the general direction of modernity.
This is a good decision. Turner and Blake had precious little to talk about.
William Blake, “The Simoniac Pope” (1824–7)
Blake now lives in room 7 beside a gallery devoted to a selection of works by Chris Ofili, a contemporary painter upon whom he has had a huge influence. Ofili loves Blake’s use of color, his free-flowing line, and his unparalleled ability to conjure into fantastical beings.
This decision, at a stroke, tells us a lot about Blake and his posthumous fame and reach. He was always out of key with his times. This is why he was ignored, abused, and so thoroughly misunderstood during his lifetime.
In fact, Blake feels very close to the near present. The doors of perception opened up to him almost 200 years ago. Could Allen Ginsberg have written “Howl” without him?
I recall, as if it were yesterday, one rainy evening I spent in a giant marquee at the Hay Festival in the early 1990s. Ginsberg was sitting on a chair on the stage in front of me, squeeze-box bouncing up and down on his bony knees as he sang, with painfully exquisite tunelessness, a fragment of a famous verse from Blake’s Songs of Innocence: “…And all the hills echo-ed.”
He sang it over and over, over and over, over and over, and over.
Our round-up of the ten most famous poems of all time
By Hannah Nepilova
No top-ten round up of famous poems could be anything other than subjective, and inevitably we have had to miss out dozens, maybe even hundreds, of major contenders. Nonetheless, we’ve done our best to put together a list that at least provides a springboard for some healthy debate.
Take a look and see if we have missed out any of your favourites!
Most famous poems of all time
‘The Tyger’ by William Blake
With its vivid imagery and universal themes, William Blake’s 1794 poem, which explores the struggle between good and evil through the metaphor of a tiger, never gets old. It has been set by a number of composers, among them Rebecca Clarke, who in her 1933 song ‘Tiger, Tiger’ , freely embraces dissonance to capture the searing intensity of Blake’s poem. The result is a terrifyingly dark sonic canvas – one of Clarke’s most intrepid tonal experiments.
‘Ode to Joy’ by Friedrich Schiller
It’s not hard to see why Schiller’s 1785 poem, ‘Ode to Joy’ which celebrates the unity of all mankind, has resonated with people all over the world. And why it would have appealed to Beethoven, deeply committed, as he was, to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the belief in the power of human progress.
He famously filched it for the fourth movement of his ninth symphony, where, in combination with his ecstatic melody, it has provided a symbol of hope and inspiration for generations of listeners.
‘Der Erlkönig’ by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
This gripping poem, written in 1782, tells the story of a father and son being pursued by the mythological creature, the Erlking, who is said to lure children to their death.
It also lured the Austrian composer Franz Schubert to write a piece of music: his famous art song Der Erlkönig, whose haunting melody and dramatic musical accompaniment capitalises on the poem’s sense of suspense and horror.
‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ by William Wordsworth
Inspired by a walk that Wordsworth took around Glencoyne Bay in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy, Wordsworth’s 1804 poem, otherwise known as ‘Daffodils’, is famous for its simple yet evocative imagery and its celebration of nature.
Though seen as a classic of English Romantic poetry – and a staple on the English Literature GSCE syllabus – it has received surprisingly few musical settings, a rare example being a song by the 20th century English composer, conductor and organist Eric Thiman.
In 2007, Cumbria Tourism also released a rap version of it, featuring MC Nuts, a red squirrel, in an attempt to lure the ‘YouTube generation’ of tourists to the Lake District.
‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling
A rousing representation of Victorian-era stoicism, Kipling’s ‘If’, written in 1910,was voted the nation’s favourite poem by BBC television viewers in both 2005 and 2009.
With its propulsive rhythm and moving message of perseverance, determination and resilience in the face of adversity, it puts you in mind of the nationalist school of English music (you can imagine Elgar having a field day with it). For all that though, its most famous musical setting is by the folk singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, who changed the last verse and updated the language.
‘Don Juan’ by Lord Byron
This epic poem is well known for its satirical tone, its romantic themes and its larger-than-life protagonist: the womanising Don Juan, whose travels and Romantic escapades are notorious.
They certainly provided plenty of fodder for the composer, Richard Strauss, who, in his 1888 tone poemDon Juan, pulled out all the stops to depict the various stages of Don Juan’s journey. At times his music is frenzied and chaotic; at times erotic and sensual; at times it is melancholic, most poignantly at the end where the hero comes to the realisation that his life has been empty and meaningless.
Don Juan is also the inspiration behind Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart‘s Don Giovanni – though Mozart’s creation is far more sinister and villainous.
‘Stop all the Clocks’ by W.H. Auden
The 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral enhanced this poem’s popularity, thanks to that famous scene in which John Hannah recited it so poignantly. But W.H Auden’s ‘Stop all the Clocks’ , otherwise known as ‘Funeral Blues’ has always struck a chord with the public – ever since it first appeared in the 1936 play The Ascent of F6.
This is a poem that everyone can relate to, whose themes of love, loss and mourning are universal, whose surface simplicity belies its internal depth – not least in the way it goes above and beyond the usual tropes associated with mourning (who, for example, would usually demand that a traffic policeman wear black cotton gloves?).
No surprises, then, that it appealed to the foremost British composer of Auden’s day, Benjamin Britten – a close creative partner of Auden’s – who set it as a song for voice and piano, elevating it with his characteristic less-is-more approach.
Shakespeare’s sonnets
Iconic though they are, Shakespeare‘s love poems have had surprisingly little in the way of musical settings – at least by classical composers.
One composer who has thrown his hat into the ring is Robert Hollingworth, director of the vocal ensemble I Fagiolini. Thieir 2012 album ‘Shakespeare: the sonnets’, paid tribute to the Bard’s time by using authentic instruments from the early 17th century, including the lirone, theorbo, viol, cornett, sackbut and shawm, amongst others.
‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allan Poe
This 1845 poem, which tells of a distraught lover who is paid a mysterious visit by a talking raven, is a masterful example of the Gothic literary tradition, encapsulating the despair of mourning. It is also renowned for its musicality, which helps to explain why a variety of composers, including Joseph Holbrooke, Leonard Slatkin, Toshio Hosokawa and Betsy Jolas, have all had a go at setting it.
‘The Lady of Shallot’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Such is the immediate appeal of this 19th-century ballad, which tells the story of Elaine of Astolat, a young noblewoman stranded in a tower up the river from Camelot, that even confirmed poetry-phobes might make an exception for it. With its flowing rhythm and vivid descriptions of the Lady’s surroundings, it creates an atmosphere full of magic and mystery that lends itself to musical adaptation.
That, at least, must have been the view of the French composer Olivier Messiaen, who used the poem as the basis for his first ever composition when he was eight years old: a piece for solo piano called La dame de Shalott.
‘The obvious lack of experience in this work will be forgiven when one learns that I was born in December 1908 and wrote it at the beginning of 1917,’ wrote Messiaen of the work. ‘In this “Lady of Shalott” a child’s imagination runs unleashed.
Nothing is missing: the castles, the inflection of the spoken word, the song of Lady Shalott (weaving!), Sir Lancelot on horseback, the broken mirror, the tapestry which flies out the window, the falling willow leaves, and the death of the lady who lies in a boat drifting down the river (barcarole!).Despite its extraordinary naivety, this work is nonetheless my op.1.’
