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Credo, matematica, inglese, filosofia, italiano fisica, senso, crepo matematica, inglese. Hoho, ma tu radio, ma tu. Mati radio, ma, ma tu mati radio. Non l'esse più su fiasco, non l'are stralato, ma, mati, mati, mati radio. Podcast di inglese per l'esame di maturita, letto da Valentina Carnellotti, preromanticism e William Blake. What do the doors, Bob Dylan, John Lennon e you two have in common? All of them are musicians, of course, but there's also something else. They had the same source of inspiration and 18th century English poets who is among the most original writers ever. William Blake. Who was Blake? And why did he have such an influence on people who lived as late as two centuries after him? Blake was a poet and a painter, but that is not enough for us to grasp his importance in English literature. William Wordsworth, a great English romantic poet, once wrote, "There was no doubt that this poor man was mad." William Blake was indeed peculiar. He's known for his visions of angels and demons and sometimes even of his dead brother Robert. Anyway, although visions and imagination were an important part of his works, he didn't become famous because of his madness. He was a brilliant mind, far too original to be understood by his contemporaries. He believed in the importance of imagination. The imagination is not a state. It is the human existence itself, he wrote. Even though he was a city dweller, nature is central to his works. He was born and raised in London, the biggest city in the world at the time. He was very much aware of what was going on in the world, of all the revolutions taking place in Europe and in America. He was openly critical of the industrial revolution, while a supporter of the French revolution at least up until Obespaire established his reign of terror. Blake was against the power of aristocracy and in favour of the abolition of slavery. Maybe the most distinctive trait of Blake's personality was his relationship with religion. He was quite spiritual. He believed in angels and devils, but he was against institutionalized religion, especially when it was in cahoots with the states. He believed that true worship and an honest relationship with God were private matters. He is considered one of the most visionary poets of the English language and also one of the most important precursors of romanticism and his visual artwork is highly regarded to this day. In order to better understand who William Blake was, his genius, and the charisma that have made him immortal, we need to step back and take a look at his life and consider the historical juncture in which he happened to live. William Blake was born in 1757 in London, namely in the District of Soho, which was not at all cool at the diamonds it is today. As a young boy, he had a vision of a tree filled with angels, a normal child would have been scared, but not our William. He continued having mystic visions throughout his life, and these episodes left a deep mark on his poetry and on his outlook on life. He said a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees, and admittedly he had a point there. His parents, somewhat worried about their son's peculiarities, made him study at home. His mother told him to read and write, and when he was still very young, he expressed the wish to become a painter. So his parents sent him to drawing school, and in due course he became the apprentice of an engraver. Engraving and painting remained his main sources of income throughout his life. For a poet who is now so well known, this may seem weird, but he didn't enjoy fame and fortune during his lifetime. Quite the opposite. He had to look for patrons, rich people who paid for his needs, and relied on them almost until his death in 1827. Blake had the misfortune, or was it a blessing, to live during what is now called the Age of Revolutions. From the American War of Independence to the French Revolution, the second half of the 18th century was a melting pot of new ideas and new doctrines, and to top it all off, there came the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution began in 1760 and transformed agriculture Britain into an industrial nation. The Industrial Revolution came as a bit of a shock for the 18th century society. Cities began to expand rapidly and sprawlingly while smoke from the new factories polluted the air. The new middle-class career richer while the poor lived in abject poverty. Working conditions were awful, people worked for starvation wages up to 16 hours a day. Child labour was rampant, also because children could be paid even less than adults. As already mentioned, these were also the years of the French Revolution. The revolutionaries in France wanted to divest the aristocracy of its power and wealth in favour of the populace. It is easy to understand why these ideas appeal to many, including William Blake. The influence exerted over Britain by France and other nations across the channel and overseas was not exclusively of a political nature. French philosopher and writer Georges Russo, who emphasized the importance of freely expressing one's emotions, was an inspiration for many British artists of the time. Russo was convinced that the expression of one's creative spirit was more important than strictly following formal rules. Now that was refreshing, new life for poetry. In Germany, the Sturmontang movement similarly exalted nature, the expression of one's feelings and human individualism. It was a clear break from the ideas of the Enlightenment and its scientific and rational spirit. The new artistic ethos that emerged all over Europe in those years is known today as pre-romanticism. The pre-romantics were fascinated by the exotic and the supernatural. Just think of Horus Walpole's Gothic novel "The Castle of Otranto" or Thomas Grey's "Elogy Written in a Country Churchyard" in which the poet wanders in a graveyard at sunset, brooding over mortality. Grey's poem was so famous, it was translated in many languages, including Italian by Melchiorre Cesarotti, and was a huge influence on Hugo Forcolo's "Dese Polcri". Thomas Grey was a precursor of Blake, and attained a greater fame during his lifetime, although he wrote much less than Blake. Blake was maybe a little too revolutionary for his contemporaries, who didn't appreciate him as much as we do today. Grey came from a wealthy family. He studied in the best colleges in England and had the chance to travel to Switzerland, France and Italy. His poetry was quite classical in style, though romantic in tone. Blake, on the other hand, was ahead of his time. His critique of the church and of institutionalized religion was too much for his contemporaries. He cared about the problems of the poor, about low salaries, long working hours, child labour, revolutions. He wrote for the poor, but the poor couldn't read his poems, while the more educated opera and middle classes who could read had no interest in such issues. Blake's first collection of poetry and prose was "Poetical sketches", printed around 1783. Although this book sold less than 50 copies, Blake was satisfied with his poetical achievement and continued writing. In 1789, he published his most popular collection of poetry, a vocatively titled "Songs of Innocence", comprised of 16 poems. Meanwhile, in France, what was going on in France in that very same year? Exactly the French Revolution. Songs of Innocence was followed five years later by "Songs of Experience", a collection of 26 poems. Both volumes had engravings by the poet himself and his wife. The artistic technique was suggested to William by his dead brother, Robert, no less during a vision. For a long time, Songs of Innocence was considered little more than a children's book. Most of the 19 poems in the collections are indeed about childhood, seen not only as a period of human life, but as a state of the soul. In other words, childhood represents an innocent outlook on life. In the poems of Songs of Innocence, Blake explores the hopes and fears of a child before he or she is corrupted by experience. Religion, always present in Blake's works, is he a personal and individual faith which gives comfort to the child. Songs of Experience is the natural counterpart to Songs of Innocence. Every child cannot help growing up eventually. The parallel universe of Songs of Experience is one of selfishness and envy. Experience has destroyed everything that was good in innocence. Even religion is now seen as a corrupting force. The two collections, as is clear from their very titles, are opposed but complementary at the same time. Every adult was once a child, every child will become an adult one day. This is a perfect example of Blake's dual vision of life, energy and restraint, desire and frustration, good and evil, opposing conditions that coexist and are essential to every human being. To use the poet's own words, without contraries is no progression, attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence. Even the language of the poems is imbued with this conflicting complementarity. The meaning of a single word of a single line changes depending on whether you read it with the eyes of a child or those of an adult. Blake's die might strike you as simple at first. He often repeats some of the lines as if they were the refrain of a song. The simplicity aims at concealing more complex reasonings. For him, the poet is a visionary. He likes visions, remember? Who can see what other people can't thanks to the power of imagination? How could he express his complex visions on paper? Through symbolism. He used flowers, children, the seasons to represent innocence, while cities, factories and machines were the symbols for rationalism and oppression. He often quoted from the Bible, even if he didn't like the church, he believed that truth was revealed, not taught. This duality inherent in the world, the fact that the innocence is unfailingly crushed by experience, all of these ideas can be found in two of his most famous poems, the Lamb and the Tiger. They are antithetical and complementary at the same time. You can't understand the Lamb without the Tiger and vice versa. Little Lamb, who made thee, dust thou know, who made thee, gave thee life and bit the feed by the stream or the meat, gave thee clothing of delight, soft softest clothing, woolly bright, gave thee such a tender voice, making all the veils rejoice. Little Lamb, I'll tell thee, little Lamb, I'll tell thee, he is called by the name, for he calls himself a Lamb. He is meek and he is mild, he became a little child, I a child and thou a Lamb. We are called by his name, little Lamb, God bless thee, little Lamb, God bless thee. The Lamb is the innocence of childhood, the poem is told from the perspective of a child who understands and loves the joys of nature. We know Blake used the Bible a lot as a reference, so who can the Lamb be, right I guess? Yes, right God himself, in the Lamb so gentle and shy, meek and mild, as the poem says, the reader can see the work of God. The tiger is a lot harder to understand. The tiger incarnates good and evil to opposing forces that can't be separated. Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame the fearful symmetry? In what distant deeper skies burned the fire of thine eyes, on what wings dare he aspire? What the hand there sees the fire? And what shoulder and what art could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, what dread hand? And what dread feet? What the hammer, what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil, what red grass there its deadly terrors clasp when the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears? Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry? The Lamb and the tiger are one, the reflection of the other. What sort of God can create something as scary as the tiger and at the same time something as gentle as the Lamb? Throughout the poem Blake keeps asking such questions, but he does not try to solve this contradiction. He just leaves the reader in awe of the complexity of creation and the universe. In his own words, I will not reason and compare my businesses to create. He was an artist after all. The word on which we should focus our attention is symmetry. If the Lamb is God, what is then the tiger with its burning eyes, a diabolical presence, the dark side of human nature? Besides this religion's interpretation, there is also a more political one. As already said, Blake was very much aware of what was going on in the world, especially in France. This poem is a perfect summary of how Blake saw the French Revolution, a contradiction between the beauty of freedom and the horror of destruction, the glory of revolution as opposed to the terror of death. We started out talking about the Industrial Revolution, remember? Well, let's go back to it because it does only serve as the historical background to his works. It is a major theme in Blake's poetry in general. Blake writes about the deplorable custom of child labor, a precursor of Charles Dickens in this respect, both in songs of innocence and in songs of experience through the technique of parallel poems. So for example, in songs of innocence the poor child who was the narrator of the poem, the chimney sweeper, dreams of freedom, but he also tells something really disturbing. Child labor can bring you to an early death, which it turns brings you to heaven. So the sooner you die, the sooner you can go to heaven. In the poem by the same title in songs of experience, there is an adult talking to the child who no longer dreams of freedom. He's alone in the snow, his parents are maybe dead, and the ending of the poem suggests that the state and the church plot together to make a heaven out of our misery. If it wasn't clear enough so far, Blake really didn't like the church as an institution. London was the largest city in the world at the beginning of the 19th century. It was dirty grey and dangerous for the poor. In his poem London, Blake describes the illness of the city, the exploited children and the evil power of the church. Again, we see his recurring themes, nature is so much better than the industrial cities and religion won't save people from poverty. Blake wrote very often about the oppressive authority of the church and the state, as for example in the marriage of heaven and hell. In it, Blake examines the fall of man and their separation from God. In this book, once again, Blake brings together pairs of opposites, soul and body, subject and object. He also declares that the body, not the soul as the church says, is the source of divinity in the world. He tried to create a new mythology at the centre of which was not the God of the Bible, but origin, a figure of reason and law. The story of origin is written in the first book of origin. Blake's other works include the so-called prophetic books, such as the French Revolution of Poem and Seven Books, published around 1791 and America a prophecy, 1793. He was a visionary and a prophet as well. Last but not least, there is his book Milton. Blake had already illustrated Paradise Lost by John Milton and so he decided to make Milton the main character of an epic poem. In the poem, Milton returns to earth from heaven to meet with Blake and expand on the relationship between the living writers and their dead predecessors. Very famous is a poem from the preface that Blake called and did those feet an ancient time, but which is commonly known as Jerusalem. This poem became so popular after Blake's death that during World War I, it was considered an alternative national anthem for Great Britain. Blake decorated all of his books himself. He was a perfectionist, maybe a little crazy, but a perfectionist nonetheless. His works were real journeys of the mind. While other painters of the time, such as Turner and Constable, were inspired by the English landscapes, Blake found inspiration in his own mind. Not at all surprising is it. At the end of his life, Blake was commissioned to illustrate the divina comedia, unfortunately he died before finishing the job. William Blake, what a fascinating personality. He can't be compared to anybody else. His visions, his idea of duality, life divided between God and evil in a constant struggle for balance, his relationship with religion and his style so simple, yet so full of symbolism, make him totally unique. Blake's poetry manages to alter the way we understand and experience the world. If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. Blake wrote, meaning that if you free your mind, you can see so much more than what's right in front of you. These words inspired Albus Huxley's essay on the use of psychedelic drugs, the doors of perception, which in turn inspired Jim Morrison, who named his band The Doors. Inspiring the name of one of the most famous rock bands in history is not a bad way to be remembered. Maturadio is a project by Podcasts di Dattici per la Maturità, promosso dal Ministero dell'istruzione con la collaborazione di Treccani e di Radio 3. Ideazione di Cristian Raimo. La sigla di Maturadio è di Teoteardo.