William Blake

William Blake (London, 1757 – London, 1827) was an English poet, painter and printmaker, a central figure of Romanticism in Britain, although he was largely unrecognised during his lifetime. Today he is often described as a model of the "total artist", since he regarded poetry and engraving as inseparable means of a single spiritual effort. This is why he matters: his poems cannot be fully understood without their images, and his work challenged the ideas of his time about reason, religion and art.

He was born at 28 Broad Street, in Golden Square, into a middle-class family. His father was a hosier, and his mother, Catherine Wright, had belonged to the Moravian Church, a detail that some critics connect with echoes in his poetry. Blake had little formal schooling and was mostly educated at home and at Henry Pars's drawing school. From an early age he reported visions; the most often cited is a tree full of angels at Peckham Rye, when he was around nine. The Bible remained a constant source of inspiration throughout his life.

In 1772 he began a seven-year apprenticeship with the engraver James Basire, whose line-engraving style was already considered old-fashioned. There he mastered a demanding technique and spent long afternoons copying tombs and Gothic details in Westminster Abbey, an experience that left a lasting mark on his style. Between 1779 and 1785 he studied at the Royal Academy, where he clashed with the prestige of Joshua Reynolds. Blake disliked Reynolds's pursuit of abstraction and what he saw as a hypocritical humility, preferring the precision of Michelangelo and Raphael. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, who could not read or write. Blake taught her to read, write and engrave, and she became an essential collaborator in the production of his books.

His major works include Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Jerusalem and Milton: A Poem in Two Books. In them he defended imagination as a higher form of knowledge than abstract reason, and he opposed organised religion. He was hostile to the Church of England and, more broadly, to institutional religion. His thought drew on the French and American Revolutions and on thinkers such as Swedenborg. In later years he moved away from many of those political convictions, though he kept a friendly relationship with the activist Thomas Paine. His work is so singular that it is difficult to classify.

In his lifetime he was regarded as eccentric, and his books reached few readers. His reputation grew in the twentieth century, when improvements in printing made his illustrated editions widely available and critics such as Northrop Frye stressed his importance. Today he is studied as a precursor of modern ideas about creativity and as one of the most original poets in the English language.