An Immense World of Delight
In English 220, Professor Maureen Harkin invites her class to examine poet and painter William Blake’s illuminated texts—hand-colored etchings which represent both joy and struggle in 18th-century England.
ENG 220: Visual Narrative, Hogarth to Blake, examines William Blake’s etchings in the context of the explosion of pictorial storytelling that accompanies the rise of the novel in 18th-century England. We focus on the new form of the printed image, a more accessible format than the panel painting, and one easier to adapt to new political, religious, or private ends. Among the works we study are the intensely personal representations of joy and struggle that Blake produces at the end of the century.
This image, “The Ancient of Days,” is the frontispiece to Blake’s Europe, A Prophecy (1794). Like many of Blake’s works, it’s smaller than one might imagine, measuring 9 by 6.5 inches. The vast majority of Blake’s image output is at this scale, designed as part of a series of illuminated books combining text and image, which Blake designed and etched himself in a unique process. Each was hand-colored, so that no two copies are quite the same, a practice which undermines the idea of a single original image.
Magisterial as this image is, its representation of the figure Urizen measuring the void is not an unalloyed image of triumphant creation, but a more complex post-Enlightenment vision of reason dividing and limiting human experience. Blake’s own elaborate mythological system is critical of any limitations that choke off the imagination; which, freed of oppressive restraint, can deliver an “immense world of delight.”
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