Influence On Artists
The British painter, Paul Nash (artist), much influenced by Blake, painted a series of Sunflower works towards the end of his life: "Sunflower and Sun" (1942), "Solstice of the Sunflower" (1945) and "Eclipse of the Sunflower" (1945). Nash apparently referred specifically to "Ah! Sun-flower" and felt an affinity with what he thought was the Sunflower's seemingly imminent death (like his own).
Allen Ginsberg was one of the poets who admired this poem. In 1948 he had the hallucinatory experience of hearing Blake reading "Ah, Sun-flower" and two other works (see : Allen Ginsberg#The Blake Vision). Ginsberg wrote his own "Sunflower sutra" in 1955, descriptive, perhaps, of love persisting amidst moral and physical devastation. He also regularly performed readings of the poem.
As befits a song, there have been many musical settings of "Ah! Sun-flower". The following are the most notable.
The British composer, Benjamin Britten's opus 74, "Songs and proverbs of William Blake" (1965) included "Ah! Sun-flower" as the 12th work in the sequence.
The British composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams included "Ah! Sun-flower" (no. 7 in the sequence) in his "Ten Blake Songs" cycle (1957).
Ed Sanders of The Fugs set the poem to music and recorded it on The Fugs First Album in 1965.
For the passing of the 2nd millennium, British composer Jonathan Dove set the text of "Ah, Sun-flower" and two other poems by Blake ("Invocation" and "The Narrow Bud Opens Her Beauties To The Sun") in his piece "The Passing of the Year" (2000), a song cycle for double chorus and piano.
In 2002, the Canadian sisters Kate and Anna McGarrigle wanted to record Ed Sanders' setting in French; they asked Philippe Tatartcheff to translate the poem, only to find the words no longer scanned with the tune. So they composed a new tune which accommodated both languages. That appeared the following year on their album La vache qui pleure in both English and French recordings.
Read more about this topic: Ah! Sunflower
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“Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“You are always looking for already-felt emotions, just as you like to get an old pair of trousers back from the cleaners, which seem new when you don’t look too closely. Artists are cleaners, don’t let yourself be taken in by them. True modern works of art are made not by artists but quite simply by men.”
—Francis Picabia (1878–1953)