Does anyone know anything about William Blake?

Question

My family is related to him (I found since there are so many men with the name Blake in my family) but I don't know anything about him except that he was a poet. I'd like to find out more about my family tree!

Answer 1

Google "William Blake" and you will find hundreds of interesting sites. You can also have a look at the site of the Tate Gallery in London. They have many works by him:

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=39&page=1

Answer 2

Oh, my goodness. If you Google William Blake (one of my favorite poets, by the way), you'll get over 2,800,000 sites.

For example, here's a sample from link number 1:

"William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) was an English poet, visionary, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake's work is today considered seminal and significant in the history of both poetry and the visual arts. He was voted 38th in a poll of the 100 Greatest Britons organized by the BBC in 2002 .
According to Northrop Frye, who undertook a study of Blake's entire poetic corpus, his prophetic poems form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language." Others have praised Blake's visual artistry, at least one modern critic proclaiming Blake "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced."[1] Once considered mad for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is highly regarded today for his expressiveness and creativity, and the philosophical vision that underlies his work. As he himself once indicated, "The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself."
While his visual art and written poetry are usually considered separately, Blake often employed them in concert to create a product that at once defied and superseded convention. Though he believed himself able to converse aloud with Old Testament prophets, and despite his work in illustrating the Book of Job, Blake's affection for the Bible was accompanied by hostility for the established Church, his beliefs modified by a fascination with Mysticism and the unfolding of the Romantic Movement around him.[2] Ultimately, the difficulty of placing William Blake in any one chronological stage of art history is perhaps the distinction that best defines him.

Here are a few others below:

Answer 3

If you want an entertaining read where you can learn about William Blake, check out the recently published "Burning Bright" by Tracy Chevalier. It's a great work of historical fiction.

Answer 4

Start with his "Songs of Innocence and Experience" , go online to the UK for more. Your ancestor was a great man and an artist, there are few hymns as popular in Britain as Sir Hubert Parry's setting Jerusalem to his poem "And did those feet, In ancient times ,Walk upon England's pastures green..." He was a publisher who published his own works with excellent woodcuts, engravings, and etchings which are today priceless and frequently reproduced.