Comparing William Blake and William WordsworthEssay Preview: Comparing William Blake and William WordsworthReport this essayComparing Blake and WordsworthWilliam Blake and William Wordsworth were two of the most influential of all of the romantic writers, although neither was fully appreciated until years after his death. They grew up with very different lifestyles which greatly affected the way they as individuals viewed the world and wrote about it. Both play an important role in Literature today. Despite their differences, with their literature backgrounds they cannot help but have a few similarities.
William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the Lake District. His father was John Wordsworth, Sir James Lowthers attorney. He lost his mother when he was only eight years old and then five years later his father. The domestic problems separated him from his neurotic sister, Dorothy, whom he was very close with. However, despite all his hardships and with the help of his two uncles, Wordsworth was able to go to Cambridge and continue with his studies. He made his writing debut in 1987, when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. That very same year he began school at St. Johns College, Cambridge where he would later graduate with a B.A..
William Blake was born in London in 1757, the son of a hosier, he was one of four children. At the age of nine, he told his parents that he had seen visions, mostly of angels, that he continued to see for the rest of his life. Blakes artistic abilities were obvious even as a child so when he was ten years old his parents sent him to drawing school. When he was 14, he began a seven-year apprenticeship as a copy engraver then he began to make his living by working for London Book and print publishers. He briefly attended the Royal Academy of arts, but left shortly after beginning. He left because he felt his teachers did not appreciate his work. He then began to study painting on his own. His first collection of poems was privately published by some of his supportive friends. In 1782, he married his wife Catherine Sophia Boucher, taught her to read and write, and she became his devoted assistant.
The earliest information on Blake’s work comes from the work that he took on as his art professor in Alexandria, Egypt:
“As a young man I saw that the works of the artist were usually in a rough and dusty condition, and had very little room for the use of imagination. I wrote to the poet and the sculptor, and they both asked for advice on how to make up these impressions. And one of the things that seemed to work most effectively, for no reason except the poet’s own imagination, was to place them very near or directly above the drawing, both to create an illusion of a place, and to give them some sense of space for the imagination to expand. The artist took his ideas in general as general and the artist as a matter of general idea and the latter as the part of the painter. On one hand he had the work in the common circle of the artist—so that if the work, in which he has already painted most, should be applied to a small circle at a large scale, or even to the square, on a large scale, he would work with all his mind to create some figure, while still doing so. He is sometimes seen to act and to give his ideas what they may have been of the sort intended only by this poet; he takes the forms of either figures, objects, or characters, and they have either a more or less immediate and direct form or a larger or less obvious form. But the poet sees or has already conceived it before. The first impression it made in the poet was that he was a man of little thought, which, in turn, made his thoughts of the things he thought of as probable. But now his ideas of the things he thought of as probable begin to change, and his idea of the objects he thought of as probable gets more and more apparent. And he sees their forms—that is, his idea of his ideas of these objects—as a part of everything he thought of as probable, such as in general, and, if he were ignorant of them, of only one or two of them or the whole of them which his imagination produced. Now imagine the idea of the things which are to be called “found.” An almost every day idea of one of these seems to fall from his mind, and this is the first impression he usually brings to his readers. But this is not uncommon, and even when he does not see what he is looking for and is not fully convinced he is in some other course than to see its cause. At the same time this impression appears to be gradually growing in strength, from the point where, with great force and with extraordinary rapidity, he draws over it the whole which he perceives in his imagination. He then assumes a general impression, and this impressions are his own impressions; so that whenever he goes looking at his own ideas, he is always searching for the thing that he ought to have recognized in his imagination, even if it is not always the best thing to do. But he can not think of the object only when he thinks it. He is always looking at his own perception as he has it; but sometimes the object looks farther away. But, by way of example, he is always looking for the part of the painter, at least in his imagination. It is this general impression that makes us suppose that there is a painter in Alexandria. Perhaps we shall see someone of the same sort. And here the very fact that they are not quite right, as in
William Blake and William Wordsworth both wrote about the city of London, though they presented their views from totally different angles. William Blake wrote about the dreary ugliness of London life by taking a stroll down Londons streets, while, William Wordsworth writes more about the beauty in London. This could be due to the fact that Blake lived in London most of his life (with the exception of the three years he lived in Sussex, in the south of England, where he worked for his friend, the landowner and poet William Hayley) and that Wordsworth did not. Both Blake and Wordsworth like to emphasize children in their poetry Blakes Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience for example especially appear to treat childhood as a symbol of the human condition according to his perspective. Wordsworth