Presenting the commercial Mr. Blake

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Those who know his work often feel strongly about the visionary poet and visual artist William Blake (1757-1827) whose legacy includes some of the most sublime works produced in Great Britain or elsewhere.

Dubbed a “man of Genius” by the great 19th century lyric poet Samuel Coleridge, Blake also earned the admiration of William Wordsworth though he, like many Blake contemporaries, thought Blake undeniably insane.

“Blake is not a tepid taste,” says Special Collections librarian Scott Krafft, who has put together a small, fascinating exhibit of Blake’s work that makes the three-story climb up Deering Library’s worn travertine staircase well worth the trip.

Titled “The Commercial Mr. Blake: William Blake as Book Illustrator and Copy Engraver” and located outside the McCormick Library of Special Collections entrance, the exhibit showcases some of the engravings and illustrations that helped finance the self-published, hand-colored books of poetry for which Blake today is acclaimed.

According to Krafft, it is designed to introduce viewers to the seldom seen, “real-world” Blake who one recent biographer called a “Stranger from Paradise.” Blake never was far from poverty’s door but neither was he the entirely anonymous, unsung artist that legend often heralds. He counted among his friends “Common Sense” writer Thomas Paine and some of the best known artists of his day. The subscriber list to the Blake-illustrated “The Grave” was star-studded with English luminaries, and notices of his death were reported in newspapers in England and abroad.

It is true that his sanity was debated throughout his lifetime. As a child, Blake reported seeing God “put his head to the window” and, at 30, observed his dying brother Robert’s spirit rise through the ceiling “clapping its hands for joy.” He consulted on printing and other matters with his brother long after Robert’s demise. He illustrated the ghost of a flea and claimed the spirit of “Paradise Lost” author John Milton entered his foot in the form of a star.

Yet, as the great romantic poet Wordsworth noted, “there is something in Blake’s madness that interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.” And, over the centuries, enthralled by the extraordinary beauty of works such as “Songs of Innocence,” “Songs of Experience,” and “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” legions of Blake admirers have agreed.

In the 20th century, Blake influenced the work of literary giant W.B. Yeats, the French surrealists and the American beat, hippie and counterculture generations. Aldous Huxley titled his 1954 account of his experience with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline “The Doors of Perception,” borrowing a line from Blake’s poetry which later inspired Jim Morrison to name his rock band The Doors.

While the University Library holds none of Blake’s privately printed, hand-colored poetry books, it does possess a fine collection of the illustrated books and prints that Blake was commissioned to do after his own designs and those of others. And, although all these are “commercial” works, they vary greatly in the degree to which they involved Blake’s imagination and creativity.

What Krafft calls “The Big Three” in the University’s collection — “Illustrations of the Book of Job,” “Night Thoughts” and first and second editions of “The Grave” — are among Blake’s greatest visual achievements and utilize the curvilinear designs and mystical elements that inhabit his own illuminated poetry books.

While he acknowledges that the most admired of the “Big Three” is “Illustrations of the Book of Job,” Krafft points with equal delight to the “youthful, springy, airy energy” of Blake’s illustrations to “Night Thoughts” and to the “compact little animal prints” that illustrate the 1805 “Ballads of William Hayley.”

Digital reproductions of all the prints in “Book of Job” will be available online at www .library.northwestern.edu/spec /exhibits/blake/job/ until the exhibit’s closing Dec. 21.

An example of Blake’s technical abilities as an engraver is his portrait of Swiss physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater. In this print, Blake’s deft use of the “dot and lozenge” technique creates the illusion of three-dimensionality through seemingly infinite numbers of fine, crisscrossing lines. “One could stare for hours at the eye in this portrait if one were in the proper mood and had no pressing engagements,” Krafft says, only half-jokingly.

According to legend, Blake became so frustrated in trying to create a particular effect on Lavater’s portrait that he hurled the copper plate across the room. At the same time, he made certain that the plate would remain damage-free as copper, for a poor man like Blake, was too expensive a commodity to throw away.

In his lifetime and for much of the 19th century, Blake was better known as a visual artist than a poet. That reputation reversed when, in the 20th century, Yeats edited one of the first Blake poetry collections and generations of readers read Blake’s literary work without ever seeing the images that Blake created to accompany them.

Like many college students of his generation, Krafft first discovered Blake as a poet and only later learned of the astonishing visual work that Blake intertwined with his words. “As a master of the multiple arts of word and image, Blake has no peer,” Krafft writes in the eloquent keepsake he created for “The Commercial Mr. Blake.”

“Blake is remarkable for the equality of eminence his poetry and pictorial works have separately achieved,” Krafft says. “In Blake’s self-published illuminated books of poetry — his greatest works — image and word intertwine like magical Siamese twins, able to separate and reconnect at will.”

Today, at last, Blake is becoming known as much for his pictures as for his words. Web sites devoted to Blake’s work, for example, can show Blake’s multi-media works as he created them. His etched words are understood as surface decoration as well as poetry. His hand-colored images are viewed as much as symbolic thoughts as pictures.

While researching “The Commercial Mr. Blake,” Krafft happened upon a book in the McCormick Library about digital book design. This very contemporary book dedicated its final chapter to Blake, calling him “one of the first and arguably finest, self-publishers in the history of bookmaking.”

— Wendy Leopold