I had the very good fortune a couple of weeks ago to be in Cambridge visiting my daughter when a new exhibition, Blake’s Universe, opened at the city’s famous Fitzwilliam Museum. I think I’d had some vague awareness of it, probably from one of the artsy newsletters that I have subscribed to at some point over the years, which I usually merely scan through to see what’s local to me. Even better, I happened to be there on the opening day so there was a palpable sense of excitement, and a scarcity of tickets.
William Blake the poet has always been on the periphery of my literary attention. He lived from 1757-1827, which was not the period of literature I found most interesting when I was at university. Ironically, it is the period of European history that I find MOST interesting; the French revolution, American revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the beginnings of industrialisation, etc.
Blake is one of the foremost figures in British cultural history, however, though he was revered more after his death than during his lifetime, even considered eccentric by his contemporaries. He was a deeply spiritual man but distrusted organised religion, preferring more mystical ideas, which are reflected both in his poetry and his art work. He is considered a poet of the Romantic school and he has influenced the likes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and WB Yeats, as well as composers such as Britten and Vaughan Williams, and, latterly, Philip Pullman who acknowledged his debt to Blake in his His Dark Materials trilogy. Perhaps most famously, the text of the famous British hymn Jerusalem, adopted as an anthem by many political groups, is taken from Blake’s Milton, A Poem (not, ironically, from his poem of the same name), and was set to music by Sir Hubert Parry in the early 20th century.
The Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition brought together much of Blake’s fascinating artwork and set it in the context of a European-wide movement which sought to challenge the established Church, its power and its religious norms. Other artists whose work has been set beside Blake’s at the exhibition include German painters Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich.
I had never seen Blake’s art work up close before I attended this exhibition. It is extraordinary. And when you think that he was working in the late 18th and early 19th centuries it is even more so. He presented many of his poems in the most beautiful engravings and in booklets with a series of plates for different stanzas. The detail, the colours, the vision of the work, jump out at you.
The exhibition is open until 19th May and I recommend it highly.
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