Word: blake
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...Romantic poets of his day, such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. But others he revered: John Milton, especially, whom he valued even above Dante. (He illustrated both.) Not only was Milton a republican and a sympathizer with regicides, but he also knew that the devil was beautiful, and so did Blake. Blake saw how insipid even Milton's descriptions of Paradise were compared with his visions of Hell, and pointed out that "the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true poet...
...Blake, heavenly characters were entirely real. You could run into them on the street and speak of them casually. "I always thought that Jesus Christ was a snubby," he remarked--Blake had a snub nose--"or I should not have worshipd him if I had thought he had been one of those long spindle-nosed rascals." He spoke to angels, chatted with the devil and dined with the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah. The latter told him that "my senses discover'd the infinite in everything, and as I was then persuaded and remain confirm'd that the voice of honest...
...English working-class thought. He was as much a traitor to Georgian belief as the execrated Tom Paine. He contemptuously referred to George III as "old Nobodaddy" and eagerly awaited his death. In an age when any utterance of disloyalty to the Crown could be and was severely punished, Blake was fearless in expressing his views. His sympathies flew to the weak and the downtrodden. He was always on the side of liberty and instinct. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," he wrote in the Proverbs of Hell. And also: "Sooner murder an infant...
...matters of art, Blake's hates were as passionate and as swollen with moral assurance as his likings. The painters he really disliked relied on color and modeling by tone, "broken lines, broken masses, and broken colors. Their art is to lose form." Whereas his was "to find form, and to keep it"--by means of pure outline drawing. The villains of his scheme were Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt: "a class of artists, whose whole art is fabricated for the purpose of destroying art." True art was linear, clear, like Raphael, Durer, Michelangelo and antique sculpture--and, Blake didn...
...Blake not only despised the way Reynolds painted, but also he was sure Reynolds' malign influence had blasted his career. The sore truth seems to be that Reynolds had scarcely heard of Blake, and would not have felt threatened by him anyway. But time was on Blake's side. Does any Reynolds fix itself in memory with the tragic vividness of Blake's watercolor of King Nebuchadnezzar, a taloned half-beast on all fours, glaring from the confines of his intolerable fate like an animal in a cage? Blake believed he had been appointed by supreme powers to render...