William Blake and Allen Ginsberg

On this date 250 years ago William Blake was born at 28 Broad Street in Carnaby Market, London. From the time he was a boy, his primary training was as an engraver and illustrator. When he was a child, Blake also claimed to have had mystical visions of God and of angels. Later, sitting by his brother’s deathbed, Blake declared he witnessed his brother’s spirit rise toward the ceiling, clapping his hands in exaltation.

Blake’s talent as a visual artist combined with his unrestrained imagination and a strong lyrical sense led to powerful poetry readers have found compelling over the centuries. Indeed, Blake’s influence reached right into the world of contemporary American poetry, primarily through the writings of Allen Ginsberg.

In 1948, during his early twenties, Allen Ginsberg claimed to have had a vision of his own during which Blake spoke his poems to the young man. Relating the experience, Ginsberg explained feeling serenity, “that there was this big god over all, who was completely conscious of everybody, and that the whole purpose of being born was to wake up to Him.” Ginsberg reported: “I wasn’t even reading, my eye was idling over the page of ‘Ah, Sun-flower,’ and it suddenly appeared—the poem I’d read a lot of times before.” The voice he assumed was Blake’s sounded “like God has a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.”

Eventually, Blake’s inspiration, along with other contributing guidance by the works of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, prompted Ginsberg to composition of his most influential poems, including “Howl,” that helped direct the course of contemporary American poetry in the last half of the twentieth century and beyond.