French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Himy, William Blake. Painter and Poet
Art and Visual Culture
Armand Himy, William Blake. Painter and Poet
Paris: Fayard, 22/10/2008.
ISBN: 978-2-213-63463-0
30,00€
Publisher's description:
William Blake (1757-1827) is well known to the public as a draftsman, engraver, painter, and watercolorist, as evidenced by the enduring success of exhibitions at the Tate Gallery.
The sheer variety of his pictorial work is captivating in the case of this artist, who was close to Henry Fuseli and stood halfway between the "Gothic" and Goya's sense of the fantastic, and who additionally illustrated the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. Yet Blake is also a major poet who—in a rather exceptional feat—illustrated his own poetic works. To be sure, Songs of Innocence and of Experience or The Marriage of Heaven and Hell have always been associated with Blake; however, this has cemented his reputation as a naive artist or a visionary for the wrong reasons, as the bulk of his poetic oeuvre remained misunderstood, if not virtually unpublished, for a very long time.
This book offers a comprehensive portrait, featuring a biography reconstructed from known facts, diaries, letters, and available anecdotes, alongside an introduction to the entirety of his pictorial and poetic works—without omitting half of them—while exploring the relationship between engraving and writing (the pen and the burin). It is worth noting that most of his poems are published without the illustrations Blake designed them with, even though they constitute a dual pictorial and verbal text, sometimes on the very same page.
The writer James Joyce was one of the first to exhume and draw upon this singular body of work. Strange or unusual titles (Urizen, Ahania, Thel, America, Tiriel, Milton, Jerusalem) introduce us to men, women, and children—a human universe captured in its glory and its mire, between the abject and the sublime, a veritable archipelago of depths, corals, foam, and successive waves, with Blake's Jesus emerging superimposed upon it.
Presenting Blake as a precursor or a pre-Romantic no longer makes much sense. His work stands like a rock in the ocean, enigmatic and of a haunting immediacy.
Armand Himy, Professor Emeritus at Paris X University, has taught English and American literature in France and abroad.
His work includes studies on Milton (Milton, Fayard, 2003), the English Metaphysical poets, and Puritanism, as well as translations, including a bilingual edition of Paradise Lost and contemporary American short stories.
Armand Himy explores the complex relationship between William Blake's visual art and his poetic output, challenging the common misconception of Blake as merely a naive visionary. Drawing on letters, diaries, and biographical records, the study addresses the division in how Blake's work has traditionally been received. While his engravings and paintings for figures like Dante and Milton gained renown, his ambitious prophetic books remained largely neglected. By examining the interplay of the pen and the burin, the author highlights how text and image function together as a unified artistic expression.
This volume is particularly useful for students of English literature, Romanticism, and art history who wish to look beyond conventional classifications of Blake as a pre-Romantic precursor. It offers a structured approach to his intricate mythology and strange titles like Jerusalem and Milton, making it a valuable resource for readers interested in the intersections of British poetry and the visual arts during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as the broader tradition of visionary literature.