William Blake

1757–1827 · England

Engraver, painter and poet who created a personal mythology of angels, devils and eternal children.

Blake was a Londoner who trained as an engraver and spent his life producing books that he both wrote and illustrated. His illuminated books — Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell — are works of total art, text and image inseparable.

He was largely unrecognised in his lifetime, dismissed as a crank. A century after his death, the Pre-Raphaelites and then the Romantics rediscovered him, and he is now regarded as one of the most important figures in British art and literature.

Style

Simple four-beat lines that often carry complex metaphysical arguments.
The contrariety of states: innocence and experience are not stages but permanent possibilities of perception.
Personal symbols — Urizen, Los, Orc — built into a mythology he shared with no one.
Visual thinking: many of his poems are essentially captions for images he was simultaneously conceiving.