William Blake
Cultural influence

Blake's work was neglected for a generation after his death and almost forgotten by the time Alexander Gilchrist began work on his biography in the 1860s. The publication of the Life of William Blake rapidly transformed Blake's reputation, in particular as he was taken up by Pre-Raphaelites and associated figures, in particular Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. In the 20th century, however, Blake's work was fully appreciated and his influence increased. Important early and mid-20th-century scholars involved in enhancing Blake's standing in literary and artistic circles included S. Foster Damon, Geoffrey Keynes, Northrop Frye and David V. Erdman.

While Blake had a significant role in the art and poetry of figures such as Rossetti, it was during the Modernist period that this work began to influence a wider set of writers and artists. William Butler Yeats, who edited an edition of Blake's collected works in 1893, drew on him for poetic and philosophical ideas, while British surrealist art in particular drew on Blake's conceptions of non-mimetic, visionary practice in the painting of artists such as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland.

His poetry came into use by a number of British classical composers, who set his works. The earliest such work known is Doyne Bell 's setting of the poem Can I see another's woe, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, published in 1876. Notable settings are by Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and John Tavener set several of Blake's poems, including The Lamb (as the 1982 work " The Lamb ") and The Tyger.

Many such as June Singer have argued that Blake's thoughts on human nature greatly anticipate and parallel the thinking of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. In Jung's own words: "Blake a tantalizing study, since he compiled a lot of half or undigested knowledge in his fantasies. According to my ideas they are an artistic production rather than an authentic representation of unconscious processes." Similarly, Diana Hume George claimed that Blake can be seen as a precursor to the ideas of Sigmund Freud.

Blake had an enormous influence on the beat poets of the 1950s and the counterculture of the 1960s, frequently being cited by such seminal figures as beat poet Allen Ginsberg, songwriters Bob Dylan, Richard Ashcroft, Jim Morrison, Van Morrison, Bruce Dickinson, and English writer Aldous Huxley. The Pulitzer-winning composer William Bolcom set Songs of Innocence and of Experience to music, with different poems set to different styles of music, "from modern techniques to Broadway to Country/Western" and reggae.

Much of the central conceit of Philip Pullman 's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials is rooted in the world of Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake also features as a relatively significant character in Brian Catling 's fantasy novel The Erstwhile, where his visions of angelic beings are figured into the story. Canadian music composer Kathleen Yearwood is one of many contemporary musicians that have set Blake's poems to music. After World War II, Blake's role in popular culture came to the fore in a variety of areas such as popular music, film, and the graphic novel, leading Edward Larrissy to assert that "Blake is the Romantic writer who has exerted the most powerful influence on the twentieth century."
oulipo:avoid_letter[a]