In the originality, comprehensiveness, and sheer energy of his analysis of the religious dimension of human experience, William Blake's artistic achievement is matched in Western literature only by that of Dante and Milton. Religion was, arguably, the primary theme and motive of all his art, poetic and pictorial. But to compare Blake's art with the work of other poets and painters soon makes clear that his own artistic program and vision differed strikingly from what is commonly understood to be the purpose of religious art. His poetry, and the illuminations that enrich it, only rarely are expressions of devotion. Although one catches glimpses of personal piety in his letters, and senses it in his more conventional pictorial art, Blake's illuminated verse is primarily social in its concerns, focusing on the historic and psychic origins of religious faith and on religion's influence on human behavior. Blake was convinced that religion profoundly affects every aspect of human life - political, economic, psychological, and cultural - and that its influence has generally not been a positive one. He detected flawed religious thinking at the root of most of the social disorders afflicting England in his time, and found that even the highest virtues associated with religion - “Mercy Pity Peace and Love” (E 12) - were routinely misconceived or manipulated for destructive ends.

I recently heard one poet praise another for achieving “balance between restraint and revelation.” Few would think to offer that praise to Blake. James Joyce's characterization would be more applicable: “Armed with this two-edged sword, the art of Michelangelo and the revelations of Swedenborg, Blake killed the dragon of experience and natural wisdom, and, by minimizing space and time and denying the existence of memory and the senses, he tried to paint his works on the void of the divine bosom.” Though wrong in some details, Joyce's characterization conveys well the extravagance, even the impossibility, of Blake's ambitions, which has played a major part in the attraction-repulsion response that has always dogged him. His poetry risks every kind of excess to achieve revelation. It brushes aside elements that might restrain it, including formal poetic conventions that help to shape and contain the drive to revelation. Enveloping the stressful, straining poems are the handsome, odd, bizarre, grotesque, weird, lovely images, which supply no balancing force.

The life of William Blake became a legend even before he died, and in discussing his life the two must be disentangled as far as possible. This presents several problems. First of all, the essential materials for his biography - letters, journals, memoirs, official records, comments of friends and others - are meager, while the uncertain dates of many of his works complicate the task of a chronology. Only ninety-two of his letters survive, the first a short note from 1791, when he was thirty-four, and most of the others are concentrated in a single decade, 1799-1808, like the few remaining letters written to him. For the most part his letters are concerned either with prosaic business matters or with what Keats called “the life of allegory,” only remotely connected to outward events and relationships. There was little external incident in Blake's life, and he lived in obscurity for most of it; except by a small group of admirers his name was largely forgotten within a decade of his death in 1827, as the subtitle of the first full-length biography, Alexander Gilchrist's 1863 Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus,” suggests. So sparse a record as this is a temptation to biographers to fill out with more or less fictional detail.

On 12 April 1827, shortly before he died, Blake wrote to George Cumberland thanking him for trying to sell copies of Blake's illuminated books and his recently published engraved illustrations to the Book of Job. Blake had first executed the Job illustrations as watercolor drawings for Thomas Butts around 1805, followed by a duplicate set for John Linnell, who commissioned him to engrave the series in 1823.

Three years later, Blake had twenty-two line engravings that looked very different from the tonal prints then popular. Indeed, they even looked different from engravings, his own included, for they were not executed in the standard “mixed method” technique, in which designs were first etched and then finished as engravings. In this technique, which Blake mastered as an apprentice, the design’s outline was traced with a needle through an acidresistant “ground” covering the copper plate and then etched with acid. The engraver went over these slightly incised lines with burins (metal tools with square or lozenge-shaped tips used to cut lines into the plate) and engraved the plate’s entire surface, uniting all parts in a web of crosshatched lines.

“If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward,” especially when the resulting productions are “of equal magnitude and consequence” with those “of any age or country” (E 692). So maintained thirty-five-year-old William Blake in an etched prospectus addressed “To the Public” and dated 10 October 1793, two weeks before the execution of Marie Antoinette would dominate the London news. “Works now published and on Sale at Mr. Blake's, No. 13, Hercules Buildings, Lambeth” comprised two “Historical Engraving[s]” - Job and Edward and Elinor - two “small book[s] of engraving” - The Gates of Paradise and The History of England (now lost or never actually published) - and, extending this range of concern with matters national, spiritual, and educational in diverse media: America, a Prophecy; Visions of the Daughters of Albion; The Book of Thel; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. In his only recorded use of the phrase now synonymous with his greatest achievement, Blake described these latter six books as “in Illuminated Printing.” The prices ranged from three to twelve shillings (almost a laborer's weekly wage). Not advertised were the author's two conventionally type-set volumes, Poetical Sketches of ten years before and The French Revolution of 1791; missing also from the prospectus were Blake's five-year-old first experiments in illuminated printing, All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion and, understandably, two manuscripts: a burlesque set in an island in the moon and a verse narrative about a mythic patriarch, Tiriel. None of the works he then advertised, which include those best known today, were to find a large market, but Blake later commented that sales were “sufficient to have gained me great reputation as an Artist which was the chief thing Intended” (letter of 9 June 1818, E 771).

Blake has been called Britain's greatest revolutionary artist. He is also routinely described as a visionary or mystic, a man more concerned with spiritual than political matters. Many critics subscribe to the intermediate position that Blake's early enthusiasm for the French Revolution transformed itself into a Romantic concern with the creative power of the imagination or a version of John Milton's “paradise within thee, happier far.” This chapter suggests, on the contrary, that Blake was always a deeply political writer, even if he was one who viewed the distinction between spiritual and political matters as the product of a fallen human consciousness, but whether he is understood as a political radical, a mystical genius, or a disillusioned fellow traveler, the judgment is complicated by a paucity of biographical information. Unlike the annotations he made on various books he owned, which regularly refer to political matters, the few Blake letters that survive rarely mention politics.

Like some other radicals in the 1790s, Blake saw the American revolution as igniting a process of liberation that would sweep around the globe, exploding repressive superstitions and causing despotic governments to crumble. Some envisaged this process as a fulfillment of the enlightenment that would establish universally acceptable principles of justice based on reason rather than on corrupt tradition. But Blake's antinomianism led him to see the enlightenment as an extension of the errors it aimed to dispel. He imagined global revolution not as universalizing the rule of reason, but as liberating desire and spreading “thought-creating fires” (SL 6:6, E 68).

The vision was certainly rebellious, but Blake himself cut an odd figure as a revolutionary. The links between his prophetic art and contemporary radicalism have been widely explored, but identifying a contemporary fit audience has proved difficult. When he composed America (1793), the first of his “continental prophecies,” he may have thought of it as an intervention in the political debate stimulated by the French revolution. But the advertised price of 10s. 6d. (E 693) put it well out of reach of a popular audience. It was his most ambitious illuminated book to date, with plates more than four times bigger than the Innocence plates.

Blake and history painting

Recent commentary on Blake has tended to find the core of his achievement in the prophetic books of the 1790s and in the later prophecies, Milton and Jerusalem. These books speak now to a world that relishes their complexity, unresolved nature, and play between image and text. Yet they represent only a part of his achievement, and were the focus of his attention, as far as we know, only between 1788 and 1796, and again between 1804 and c. 1820.He was more continuously preoccupied with his work as a painter in tempera and watercolor of biblical and literary subjects, usually in series. Blake's “illustrations” are not a secondary activity but are quite as personal and imaginative as his prophetic work. It is true that there were artists like Blake's friend Thomas Stothard who made a living from designing illustrations to novels and other works, and Blake often engraved from the drawings. But such illustrations were clearly subordinate to the text. Blake's designs, on the other hand, constitute an active engagement with each text by an artist who never doubted that he was the peer of any author. Furthermore, his designs are informed by assumptions and traditions that belong to discourses of art rather than literature. They look back to the Italian Renaissance and to ancient Greece, and in later years to Gothic and even Hindu traditions. The fact that the starting point for almost all of Blake's temperas, watercolors, and some separate prints was a text written by another author no more diminishes them than Michelangelo's use of the Bible diminishes the Sistine Chapel. Blake argued that each of his tempera or watercolor designs had the potential to be hugely enlarged, and that his method of “portable Fresco” (E 527) would enable him to produce public paintings on a monumental scale.

Is Jerusalem unreadable? Several of its ringing declarations - “I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create” (pl. 10:20, E 153) - have become cultural mottoes in our time. But is Jerusalem more than a curiosity shop with some treasures amidst the clutter? Viewing the work from afar permits orderly schemes of supposed comprehension; but the closer we come to the poem's walls of words, the less clear our vision, the less certain our resolve to persevere through all 100 plates. To plunge into Jerusalem is to confront a profoundly unsettling experience.

The text of Jerusalem appears to be a narrative, replete with reasonably standard English syntax, a third-person narrative voice, named characters, and events. Yet these ingredients resist linkage into a chronology of represented actions constituting a story, much less a sequence of causes and consequences forming a plot. The characters seem like human personalities for brief passages, but they expand or contract into polymorphous personifications of psychic or cosmic categories resisting both stability and definition. These entities give speeches, but they constitute a series of monologues rather than conversations. Space is granted more than three dimensions, with Britain, Palestine, and fictive places mixed and matched like skewed map overlays. Time is also multiple, with moments and eternities each containing the other. The poem immediately assumes a command of Blake’s private mythology, as though he had carried the epic tradition of beginning in medias res to a bizarre conclusion: not the middle of a famous action, but the middle (muddle?) of Blake’s mind. Yet, for all its freedom from the consensus realities that make texts readable, Jerusalem is highly repetitious in its imagery and actions.

Reading William Blake's illuminated books is, to say the least, an uncanny experience. Some people find it unappealing. Not seeing any immediately obvious meaning, not even recognizing in Blake's text any of the conventions and cues which normally guide readings along, they find themselves repelled by the text's seemingly obscure words and bizarre images, and ultimately find reading Blake a tiring and unrewarding activity, involving a great deal of effort and very little definite accomplishment. Other readers admire Blake's work for the very same reason: confronting the seemingly impenetrable wall of words and images, they arm themselves with formidable scholarly guides, dictionaries and code books, writings of long-forgotten mystics and visionaries, and they seek out the text's buried treasures, relishing the extraction of what they take to be the mysterious knowledge contained within, access to which is seemingly barred to all but those who have passed certain (presumably secret) rituals of initiation.

The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the principal musical resources used in jazz improvisation as well as an approach to listening to jazz from the ‘bottom up’ – a way of hearing that will stress the interactive interplay between the soloist and the accompaniment. The melodic vocabulary of the improvising jazz soloist, which is what generally first catches the new listener's attention, must always be seen as emerging in a complex dialogue between the soloist and the rhythm section, and between the preexisting musical knowledge of the band members and what they collectively discover in the process of improvisation.

Among the many musical characteristics associated with jazz are improvisation, syncopation, swing, blues feeling, call-and-response organisation and harmonic complexity. Improvisation and swing are often considered to be the most important elements of jazz, although defining them has proved elusive. Improvisation has been described as the spontaneous creation of music in performance, but the sense of improvisation as elaborating upon something previously known is sometimes lost in this definition. Swing has generally been defined as forward propulsion through time resulting from the interplay between a fixed underlying pulse and the unevenly articulated subdivisions of that pulse which must ultimately be shaped into convincing phrases. The improviser does this in call-and-response with a rhythm section (generally piano or guitar, bass and drums) – an ensemble within an ensemble whose function is both to keep time and interact with the soloist.