William Blake's poetry with Philip Pullman

On the Road with Penguin Classics

In this episode of On the Road with Penguin Classics, host Henry Elliott sits down with Sir Philip Pullman in his Oxfordshire home to discuss the life and

Key takeaways

• William Blake was almost entirely unknown during his life, selling only about 30 copies of his most popular work.
• Blake utilized a unique, laborious method of 'illuminated' printing involving hand-engraving copper plates with acid-resistant solutions.

Main topics

• William Blake's biography
• Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Notable quotes

A robin redbreast in a cage puts all heaven in a rage.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a profound tribute to Blake's visionary power, i

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:03) A robin redbreast in a cage puts all heaven in a rage. A dove house filled with doves and pigeons shudders hell through all its regions. A dog starved at his master's gate predicts the ruin of the state. Speaker 2 (0:17) He was doing every stage of the process, wasn't he? From writing right through to production, printing. So there'd have been wet paper hanging from washing lines across the room. There'd have been stacks of copper plates ready for his process. Speaker 1 (0:30) It's like an enchantment. It has a spell on you. And people who don't realise that are in the position of being bothered and bewildered without realising that they're bewitched. Speaker 2 (0:44) Hear the voice of the bard who present, past and future sees, whose ears have heard the holy word that walked among the ancient trees. Speaker 2 (0:57) Those are the opening lines of Songs of Experience by William Blake, the poet, artist and prophet who died almost 200 years ago in 1827. Blake wrote some of the best-known and most loved lines in English verse, lines such as Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forests of the night, and did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green? And yet in his lifetime, he was almost completely unknown. He sold just 30 copies of his most popular book, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and none of his epic masterpiece, Jerusalem, on which he worked for 16 years. The critic Northrop Frye described Blake's work as, in proportion to its merits, the least read body of poetry in the English language. Since his death, however, Blake's influence has grown and grown. He has inspired poets from Swinburne and Rossetti to Yeats and Ginsberg, and musicians as diverse as Benjamin Britten, Billy Bragg, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Patti Smith. Blake is now read, loved and taught in schools around the world, and his artworks are a treasured highlight of museum collections. In 2005, the critic Jonathan Jones... called him far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced. Speaker 2 (2:45) Hello and welcome to On the Road with Penguin Classics, the podcast that takes a stroll around the world's favourite books. I'm Henry Elliott, the author of the Penguin Classics book, and today I'm going to throw off Newton's sleep, cleanse the doors of perception, and embrace the fourfold vision of Blake's extraordinary poetry. Today we're sitting in the home of our guest, in a beautiful home in the Oxfordshire countryside, surrounded by books and on some extremely comfortable sofas. And it is my privilege to introduce Sir Philip Pullman to this episode. Philip, welcome. Speaker 1 (3:21) Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be talking to you about Blake on this fairly warmish afternoon. Speaker 2 (3:28) Sir Philip Pullman is the author of novels, plays, fairy tales, fables and graphic novels. He is perhaps best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy, Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Northern Lights won both the Carnegie Medal in 1995 and the Carnegie of Carnegies in 2007 for the best children's book of the past 70 years. Set in the same world is his trilogy The Book of Dust. the first two instalments of which are La Belle Sauvage and The Secret Commonwealth. Philip is a believer in the democracy of reading and a vocal critic of organised religion. He tries to read like a butterfly and write like a bee. Philip, well, I'm really thrilled to be here discussing Blake with you this afternoon. And to start with, in your wonderful collection of non-fiction, Demon Voices, you describe... Blake, as a poet who has inspired and intoxicated you for 50 years. How was it that you first discovered Blake? Speaker 1 (4:32) Well, I could make it 60 years now because when I was about 16, I had sort of done poetry at school in the way that one does. But the best things in poetry came to me by accident, as it were, overhearing them. For example, I overheard somebody at school, in my second year at school, I would have been about 12, 13, rehearsing Eliot's The Journey of the Magi to speak at a school prize-giving or something. I didn't know what it was because I wasn't in the classroom where it was being done. It had the effect on me that poetry had on A.E. Hausman. It made his skin bristle, so he said he dared not think of a line of poetry when he was shaving or he'd cut himself. Well, it had a physical effect on me, those lines from Eliot's poem, which I didn't even know was a poem. But just the way the lines worked and the words worked together made my skin bristle, made my hair stir, made my heart beat faster. I had the same reaction of three or four years later in a sixth form class where we were reading Paradise Lost aloud. Speaker 1 (5:43) And that was the way we did it with Miss Jones, Miss Enid Jones, my great English teacher. And she didn't bother to explain all the difficult stuff before we got to it or tell us in a sort of ponderous way what it was all about. She let the magic of the sound, the music of the words, work its own enchantment on us. and i still remember it was the lines as when far off at sea a fleet descried hangs in the clouds by equinoctial winds close sailing from bengala or the isles of turnet and tydore whence merchants bring their spicy drugs they on the trading flood through the wide ethiopian through the cape ply stemming nightly toward the pole So seemed far off the flying fiend. Those words, as happening to me now, my prayers on end, is describing Satan as he flies through hell. But Blake, I came to in two ways. One was a book on the shelf that's just behind you as you're sitting there. It's called A Hundred Great Lives, which must have been given to me by some relative when I was about nine, ten. One of those lives was the life of William Blake. And I liked the look of him in the picture, in the painting by, I think, Thomas Phillips. And I liked the poem that they quote. One of the first things he wrote, How sweet I roamed from field to field And tasted all the summer's pride Till I the Prince of Love beheld Who in the sunny beams did glide. I didn't fully understand it, but I loved the sound of it. And then, again, it's school. In the sixth form, we were allowed to go and choose some books from the mobile school's library service van, which came round once a year or once a term or something. And because I was interested in poetry, I got a book called The New American Poetry, 1945 to 1960. It's an anthology, and it included Allen Ginsberg's Howl Speaker 2 (7:44) and Speaker 1 (7:45) Sunflower Sutra and various other things by Ginsberg, which directly referenced Blake. So I thought, I'll have another look at this chap. And on one of my rare visits to London, I went to Foyles and bought this little collection of some of his poems in an American paperback edition, which is falling to pieces. I've stuck it together with sticky tape and its paper's all yellowing. It was published in 1960, so it's that old. But I took it with me everywhere. It's so small you can put it in a pocket. I read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in here. I read all the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. I read Auguries of Innocence. I read all the great poems and some of the extracts from the long poems, from America, A Prophecy, for example. This wonderful section, The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations, the grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up. The bones of death, the covering clay, the sinews shrunk and dried, reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing awakening, spring-like redeemed captives when their bonds and bars are burst. Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field, let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air, and so on. Wonderful stuff, and it intoxicated me. And as I was keen to write things and keen to write poetry, I wrote a lot of imitation Blake and a lot of imitation Ginsberg. Ginsberg was rather easier to imitate. But that's how I first came across Blake and first became, as I say, intoxicated by him. Speaker 2 (9:23) I love the way you describe responding to it without necessarily knowing exactly what it means. And there's another place where you say that you knew that these poems were true in the way that you knew you were alive. Speaker 2 (9:36) And not that instinct. Speaker 1 (9:37) I think it was G.S. Eliot who said, poetry communicates before it's understood. And this is the mistake that a lot of, dare I say, teachers, certainly young teachers make. They think that poetry is a fancy way of saying simple things. So they think they must explain it, as it were, translate it into English so that we can understand it. And when you've translated it from poetry into prose, you've got it. You've done that poem. You can go on to the next one. That's a terrible mistake. Poetry has got to be heard. That's one thing. It's got to be in the ears and in the mouth. Reading it with the eye alone won't work. and reading it with the eye while you're listening to something else on your earphones, it will never work. The sound is in some mysterious way not any part of the meaning, but the meaning itself. That's where the magic is, as it is in those lines from Eliot, a cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey and such a long journey, the ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter. How does he do that? I do not know. But it works and it's enchantment and it works every time. It's like an enchantment. It has a spell on you. And people who don't realise that are in the position of being bothered and bewildered without realising that they're bewitched. Speaker 2 (10:59) That's wonderful. And it's good to remind ourselves that one of the collections we'll be talking about today is the songs of innocence and of experience. And we know that Blake sang a lot and was singing as he died, of course, and would sing the poems that he wrote. And it was all about the sound of them. His poems have been set by so many. composers and musicians since, but we'd have none of his original. Speaker 1 (11:23) No, we haven't. I'm not sure that he'd fill the Albert Hall like Bob Dylan, but it would be so fascinating. Now, on Speaker 2 (11:32) this podcast, what we often do is go out into the world and go to locations where books are set or where they were written. For Blake, the great setting of his life was the city of London, where he was born and where he died. And he lived 66 of his 69 years in that city in various different addresses. He was born on Broad Street near Golden Square in Soho. His father was a hosier and he was born above the shop, as it were, in the building that would always be the family home. His brother, James, took it on after his father died and Blake would later... have one of his only public exhibitions of his work in the room where he was born, above the Hosea's shop there. That location is now a huge sort of brutalist residential block called William Blake House. But it's rather good. They have a quotation from Blake. And if you step inside the doors, there's quite a striking triptych relief sculpture of Blake walking along and then in the third one, suddenly turning to look at you. It's quite effective. Speaker 1 (12:34) I'd never seen that. I must go and have a look at it. We must forget also that London was much smaller then. Speaker 2 (12:39) And, Speaker 1 (12:40) you know, we need to mention places like Hampstead and Primrose Hill. These were pretty well out in the country. Battersea, which is where his wife came from. I think her father was a market gardener in Battersea. So, you know, it wasn't a gigantic metropolis, though it probably seemed so to people of that era. Speaker 2 (12:58) And he'd walk quite far afield, wouldn't he? Because, of course, there's that... Description of how he walked all the way to Peckham Rye as an eight-year-old and saw a vision of angels glittering in the trees down Speaker 1 (13:09) there. Speaker 2 (13:09) And London recurs throughout his work in different ways, doesn't it? How does he write about the city of London? Speaker 1 (13:18) I wander through each chartered street near where the chartered Thames does flow and mark in every face I meet marks of weakness, marks of woe. It's a description of London seen from down there. from in the poor streets, in the slums possibly. It's a vision of London which reminds me of a very different, actually not all that different, artist called Franz Mazerelle. He was a Belgian woodcut artist, early 20th century, very expressionist. And he did a wonderful series of woodcuts of the city, this sort of anonymous... place crowded with faces and with huge buildings seeming to press down on the... Speaker 2 (14:04) He called them wordless novels, didn't he? That's exactly it, Speaker 1 (14:06) yes. Now, you know, like Blake, another artist, another artist in engraving or, in this case, woodcutting. And also a similar sort of vision of the city as a place that oppresses, that is inimical to free human life. Speaker 2 (14:25) You're quoting from