The languid strings do scarcely move!

The sound is forc'd, the notes are few!

"In those lines," it has been said, "the eighteenth century dies to music." (Wilson 1) The writer of these lines was William Blake, English poet, painter and engraver who created a unique form of illustrated verse. His poetry, inspired by mystical vision, is among the most original, lyric, and prophetic in the English language.

William Blake has become one of the English speaking world's most renowned poets and artists. (Essick 9) His writings are taught frequently in schools and studied by scholars. However, in his lifetime, his works were hardly known except for a small group of patrons and connoisseurs. His symbolic pictures

Blake continued to grow intellectually through the influence of his brother Robert who died by consumption when he was twenty. After he saw his brother's soul "ascend heavenward clapping its hands for joy," Blake continued to seek inspiration through his favorite brother. Blake continued his strong belief in the spiritual world throughout the rest of his life. When he was ten years old he tried to convince his father that he had seen angels in a tree and, he asserted throughout the rest of his life, that he spoke with many of the spirits, angels, and devils that he wrote about.

In about 1788, he developed a method of "Illuminated Printing," as he called it in a I793 advertisement. According to Blake's earliest biographers, the technique was revealed in a dream by Blake's recently deceased and much-beloved younger brother, Robert. Visionary revelations may have played a role, but we can also see how the new approach to printmaking evolved out of the craft in which Blake had been trained. In conventional (or "intaglio") etching and engraving, the ink resides in and is printed from lines and dots incised into the copperplate. Blake's process, now generally called "relief etching," reverses this relationship and creates a metal plate with the printing characteristics of a woodcut. Blake began by drawing his pictures with a brush, or letters with a stylus, on a copperplate in an acid-resistant liquid that would harden quickly on contact with the metal. This liquid was very probably one of the "stop-out" varnishes used for intaglio etching. Letters had to be written backwards so that they would print right-way around, but this would have offered few problems for a skilled engraver. Blake next applied acid to the face of the plate, and this would eat away the unprotected metal to leave the images in shallow relief. White lines could be added to dark areas either by scratching through the varnish before etching or by cutting into the metal with an engraving tool after the application of acid. Having removed the stop-out material, Blake would ink the relief surfaces and print with light pressure in the engraver's rolling press he probably acquired during his partnership with Parker.

coarsest and progressing toward a fine abrasive. Olive oil, metal burnishers, and rolled felt were then used to polish the surface to a clean finish. A smooth surface made the plate easier to wipe clean from ink and reduced resistance from the etching tool as incisions were made. Finally, the mirorlike plate was completely cleansed of the oil residue left behind by the last shining step. If any residue was left on the copperplate, the etching ground would have lifted off the plate when submerged in acid. To remove the excess residue, Blake would use a mixture of ammonia and whiting to absorb the slippery film.

and visionary poems are not always easy to understand, because he invented his own mythology to express his ideas. His pictures and poems reveal a powerful artistic imagination.

The Lamb (1789) is one of the plates illustrating Songs of Innocence, a series of poems by the English poet, painter, and engraver William Blake. Blake made the illustrations for this collection of poems by combining metal-relief etching with watercolor painting. His unique style was imaginative and visionary and was a radical departure from the type of art generally produced in the late 18th century.

Before preliminary etching could begin, Blake covered the plate with a ground or stop-out varnish to resist the acid's action. Blake's intaglio plates were prepared with a soft varnish containing a virgin wax (purified beeswax) and asphaltum. The varnish was cooled in water, wrapped in linen, and was daubed onto the heated plate so as to flow evenly over its surface. To provide an opaque background so Blake could see where the design was drawn, he would blacken the plate with smoke by inverting it over a candle. This darkening process provided the best contrast betwee

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Approximate Word count = 5037
Approximate Pages = 20 (250 words per page double spaced)