`BLAKE' A THOUGHTFUL PICTURE OF COMPLEX POET, ARTISAN.

Byline: Brenda Cronin Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Title: ``Blake: A Biography''

Author: Peter Ackroyd 

Data: 399 pages, Knopf; $35

Our rating: Four Stars

In his thorough and engaging biography of William Blake, Peter Ackroyd sparks a colorful tale from a life blighted by poverty, obscurity and unappreciated toil.

Ackroyd illuminates Blake the poet and painter, and particularly Blake the journeyman engraver, giving ample evidence why the genius was dismissed by critics and the public as an argumentative eccentric, a frustrated artist locked in a craftsman's trade.

Ackroyd, the author of biographies of Dickens and T.S. Eliot as well as novels, poetry and criticism, humanizes his dyspeptic subject by portraying the spiritual, artistic and industrial shifts that shaped Blake's universe. Thus, the author of ``Tiger, Tiger'' and ``Songs of Innocence and of Experience,'' becomes intriguing and even likable as one examines his world. While the poetry, paintings and engravings of the artist were valued and understood by only a handful of his contemporaries, Ackroyd's account evenly presents Blake's chance misfortunes and deliberate contrarian steps that condemned him to a lonely, solitary course.

He was born on Nov. 28, 1757, in London, where he spent all but three years of his life. The third of seven children born to a hosier and his wife, Blake established his introspective patterns early. As he detested authority, he was largely self-taught through reading and wandering the city. He spent much of his childhood exploring London alone, and on these walks, first experienced the spiritual apparitions that were to haunt and enrich his life. These visions - of ghosts, angels, historical figures and relatives - fueled Blake's imagination and oriented him in the world at the same time that they hampered his work and sustained his reputation for being lazy and unstable. Blake maintained that the visions were not a special talent but rather an ability shared but not developed by all human beings.

As a child, Blake also began reading the Bible, and identified with its solitary or suffering individuals, such as Job and Joseph of Arimathea, who figured in his engravings, illustrations and poetry later in life.

Blake's parents recognized and encouraged their son's talent by enrolling him at age 10 in a local drawing school. But after five years of a traditional arts education, Blake did not pursue the logical course of studies at the Royal Academy. Rather, he took the tradesman's route, and began seven years' apprenticeship in engraving, the trade that would engage him for the best part of his life. Ackroyd's account is rich with explanations of the engraver's craft and business, illustrating how both forced Blake to develop patience and discipline.

At his apprenticeship's end, Blake still aspired to be an artist and not a tradesman, and thus changed course once more, studying painting for six years at the Royal Academy. However, he had to help support his parents, and after the academy, began to work as an engraver.

Forced to choose commerce over art, Blake entered ``the trade to which he would be always bound,'' Ackroyd explains. ``There were advantages to it, since he could never have survived upon his art alone, but he had entered a life of continual labor in which he was forced to work within strictly defined limits and to carefully formulated rules.''

Blake continued to write poetry and read in his spare time, filling his notebooks and sketch pads with verses and drawings heavily influenced by religion.

Even locked in the vise of the printmaker's trade, Blake pursued his art, confident of his prophetic vision and wish to shake England's spiritual complacency. Using every visual and literary medium at his disposal and even inventing new ones, such as painting on copper plate to produce an illuminated book, Blake labored on, as his youthful hopes of renown dwindled to resignation by middle age.

He discarded none of his creations, and often reworked drawings, engravings and verses years later. His masterpiece epics ``Jerusalem'' and ``Milton'' were produced after sixteen years of writing and rewriting between other duties. Ackroyd observes that in his youth, Blake already placed himself in the ``visionary company'' of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. However, instead of being revered, Blake was ``known only as an engraver, a journeyman with wild notions and a propensity for writing unintelligible verse. He labored for his bread, eccentric, dirty and obscure.''

Blake was sustained through his lonely pilgrimage by Catherine Boucher, whom he married when starting out as an engraver. Catherine was devoted to her husband, although she professed not to understand his prophecies or spiritual mission. While Catherine did not have visions of her own until later in life (and ``met'' daily with her husband in the four years between his death and hers), she was Blake's conjugal bulwark and household manager, his workshop assistant and comfort in an unsympathetic world.

Blake augmented his engraving work with commissions from a series of patrons whom he eventually alienated and rejected, through his brusque and blunt manner, and allegedly desultory work habits.

While Catherine served as a buffer between her temperamental spouse and his benefactors, even she was unable to prevent or heal the ruptures that occurred every few years, as Blake railed at the confines of too-commercial work or a prevailing aesthetic that deemed his work too wild and unsettling. Ill-suited to the business of engraving and making money, he found the entire pursuit of profit and material wealth vulgar and contrary to artistic goals and purity.

``I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art,'' a journalist, Henry Crabb Robinson, quoted the artist from a series of conversations toward the end of Blake's life.

His only lifelong constants were Catherine, work and London, with one three-year sojourn in Sussex, where Blake decamped at the turn of the century, drawn by the promise of steady work illustrating the verses of his latest patron, the poet William Hayley. Once again, Blake followed his cycle of delight, disillusionment and confrontation with his benefactor. This time, the falling out was complicated by artistic rivalry and dissatisfaction with the location, where Catherine fell sick from the damp, and Blake was deprived of the stimulus of his native city.

Back in London in 1803, the Blakes resumed life in greater penury than ever, eking out a living from business connections that had shriveled in their absence.

But shortly before turning 50, Blake had an artistic and spiritual epiphany in which he freed himself from the daily labors of engraving and working in a print shop. Buoyed by the giddy excitement in art he had had in his youth, he gave up commercial work, and devoted himself to his own pieces and patrons' commissions.

This liberation committed Blake to more rather than less work, as his pictures and poetry developed a following among a group of young English artists. They revered and encouraged Blake, and eased his passage into old age with sufficient commissions to sustain the master until his death in 1827.

Ackroyd's book is organized into an accessible chronology, with important themes in Blake's life and work - such as the Bible, labor, spirituality - discussed in shorter chapters, that complement their longer counterparts that advance the thread of Blake's life. The book includes fine reproductions of some of Blake's engravings and paintings that express the vision from which this misunderstood genius never wavered.

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Photo: no caption (Book cover - Blake: A Biography)