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EILEEN BATTERSBYponders William Blake and Jacob Bronowski

WILLIAM BLAKE WAS considered insane. That negative view of the English visionary poet and artist had not much altered by the time of his death, at the age of 70, 185 years ago tomorrow. William Wordsworth, on hearing that Blake had died, astutely put that madness into context: “There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.”

Blake was unusual – a true radical possessed of an original imagination. He lived during a time of immense change. As a young man, he witnessed the anti-Catholic protest known as the Gordon Riots, was fascinated by the French Revolution and would be charged for sedition during the Napoleonic Wars. In Blake we see all the possibilities of questing human intelligence, the mystical and the practical.

He was born in 1757, the third child of a London hosier. It was a Dissenting household. Blake did not go to school. He was apprenticed to an engraver, an experience that may well have determined his life’s work. His master was engraver to the Royal Society of Antiquaries. Blake became a student at the then fledging Royal Academy. He married the daughter of a market gardener. There were no children, but the marriage was long and happy, ending only in Blake’s death. He was a Londoner, probably speaking, as his biographer Peter Ackroyd points out in Blake (1995), with a Cockney accent. Blake’s faith in the world of the spirit antagonised many at a time of emerging scientific rationalism. His vision combines simplicity and sophistication.

His first book, Poetical Sketches, was published in 1783. A year later he set up a print shop. In 1789, Blake published his first masterpiece, a collection of poems, Songs of Innocence, which he also engraved. Most of the poems are about childhood, some are even written in the language of children. Others introduce traces of the prophetic tone that would emerge in his later work.

A further volume, Songs of Innocence and Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, appeared in 1795. Included in The Songs of Experience are Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright and O Rose thou art sick. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which he also engraved, was completed between 1790 and 1791.

William Blake is now revered as a central figure in English romanticism. The opening lines of his Auguries of Innocence – “To see a world in a grain of sand/and a heaven in a wild flower/hold infinity in the palm of your hand/and eternity in an hour” – remain among the most profound ever written and influenced another seer, the polymath scholar Jacob Bronowski, when writing his monumental 13-part television series The Ascent of Man.

Commissioned by David Attenborough, then controller of BBC2, Bronowski’s eloquent masterpiece, blending history and science, traced the development of society. His sympathetic delivery beguiled millions. It was first transmitted in 1973. Just over a year later, the Polish-born Bronowski suffered a fatal heart attack.