Blake Set to Music

Abstract

In Blake’s juvenile Poetical Sketches (‘commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year’ (E846)), music is simply the conventional adjunct to poetry. A number of the poems are called ‘Song’ — but this is just ‘the imaginary conjuring of songs which are not songs’ (Hoagwood xiii).¹ However, for the mature Blake, music and musicality are basic to his vision of art. His early biographer, Allan Cunningham, describes how Blake’s poetry and art were one with his music:

In sketching designs, engraving plates, writing songs, and composing music, he employed his time, with his wife sitting at his side, encouraging him in all his undertakings. As he drew the figure he meditated the song that was to accompany it, and the music to which the verse was to be sung, was the offspring too of the same moment.

(Bentley, Blake Records 633)