Famous Writers

Although not highly regarded either as a painter or poet by his contemporaries William Blake has the distinction of finding his place in the top ten of both English writers and English painters.

The reason he was disregarded is because he was very much ahead of his time in his views and his poetic style, and also because he was regarded as being somewhat mad, due to behaviour that would be thought of as only slightly eccentric today– for example, his naturistic habit of walking about his garden naked and sunbathing there. He illustrated his poems and the poems of others like Chaucer, Dante and Milton but his exhibitions of these illustrations were sneered at, and one reviewer wrote that they were  ‘nonsense, unintelligibleness and egregious vanity,’ and another called Blake ‘an unfortunate lunatic.’

Regarding his views, he was vehemently opposed to organised religion and the way it constrained natural human activity, such as sex. In one of his poems, The Garden of Love, he specifically accuses the church of that. During a walk in the garden of love he sees ‘priests in black gowns were walking their rounds/And binding with briars my joys and desires.’

Blake began training as an illustrator and engraver and worked at that as his day job. And in the meantime, he wrote his poems.

The most important thing about Blake as a poet is his rejection of the highly sophisticated verse structures of the 18th century: he looked back to the more immediate, accessible poetry of Shakespeare, Jonson and the Jacobeans. He used monosyllabic words and packed more meaning and feeling into them that any of the poets of his time did, writing their expansive, sophisticated poems full of figures of speech. For example, two of Blake’s most famous collections: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience contain some of the finest and most profound of English poems, all done in the most simple language.

Charles Dickens was an extraordinary man. He is best known as a novelist but he was very much more than that. He was as prominent in his other pursuits but they were not areas of life where we can still see him today. We see him as the author of such classics as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House and many others. All of his novels are English classics.

Dickens had an almost unbelievable level of energy. In addition to writing all those lengthy books in long-hand, he had time to pursue what would have been full-time careers for most people in acting, literary editing social campaigning and philanthropic administration. He was also the father of a large family, as well as being involved in a love affair that lasted many years.

He began as a journalist, writing little pieces about daily life and developed very quickly into a best-selling novelist, avidly read throughout the English speaking world. At the same time he was appearing in plays and touring, reading from his novels. And editing his literary journals, Household Words and All the Year Round, which featured the serialization of his novels, with people queuing up to buy them, eager to find out how the previous episode would be concluded.

Unknown as a poet during her lifetime, Emily Dickinsonis now regarded by many as one of the most powerful voices of American culture. Her poetry has inspired many other writers, including the Brontes. In 1994 the critic, Harold Bloom, listed her among the twenty-six central writers of Western civilisation.

After she died her sister found the almost two thousand poems the poet had written. As her poems entered the public consciousness her reception concentrated on her eccentric, reclusive nature, but since then she has become acknowledged as an original and powerful poet. It is fortunate that her sister gained access to the poems as without them American culture would have been very much poorer.

Emily Dickinson challenged the existing definitions of poetry and what the work of a poet is. She experimented with language with the aim of freeing it from conventional restraints. She created a new type of persona for the first person narrator: the speakers in Dickinson’s poetry are observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escape from that. To make the abstract concrete and to define meaning without constraining it she created a distinctive language for expressing what was not yet realized but possible. In her view while poetry liberated the individual, it also left her ungrounded. When the first volume of her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with remarkable success.

Dante was an Italian poet. His most famous and acclaimed poem is the long narrative, The Divine Comedy, the story of the narrator’s journey through hell and purgatory to paradise. It impacts on modern life in that its picture of what hell is like, with its ice and sulphurous fire, where sinners are tortured in the most horrific way, is the image Western culture has of hell. It is the picture of eternal torture that was painted by the Catholic Church for centuries.

Similarly, his purgatory and paradise have become the fixed image of what those places are like and, in fact, have until recently been taught by some religions as though they were real rather than fictional places. In some Christian sects they are still taught as the places invented by Dante.

Dante is considered to have had one of the greatest literary minds in the whole history of world literature. It is a popular view that if one were to choose one other ‘modern’ (as opposed to ‘ancient’) writer that is in the same class as Shakespeare it would be Dante. Apart from everything else, he did for the modern Italian language what Shakespeare did for modern English. At a time when it was thought that any serious work of literature had to be written in Latin he was a fierce defended of the vernacular and wrote even The New Life and The Divine Comedy in the Tuscan dialect. The use of the dialects of the areas where the writer lived subsequently became acceptable in Italy and resulted in the work of other great Italian writers like Petrarch and Boccaccio.