William Blake

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William Blake was an English poet, painter, and engraver who claimed to see visions throughout his life and made them the matter of his art. Largely unread in his lifetime and dismissed by many who knew of him as mad, he is now counted among the major figures of English Romanticism — and, separately, among the most singular visionaries the modern West has produced.

He was born in London in 1757 and worked there as a commercial engraver, a trade that shaped everything he made. From childhood he reported seeing things others did not: a tree filled with angels on Peckham Rye, the prophet Ezekiel beneath a bush, later the spirit of his dead brother Robert rising through the ceiling with arms outspread. He spoke of these as plain experience rather than metaphor, and his wife Catherine, who learned to read and engrave at his side, appears to have taken him at his word. From around 1788 he produced his “illuminated books,” etching text and image together on copper and hand-tinting the prints — a method he said Robert had shown him in a vision, and one that let him bypass the publishing trade entirely.

The early lyric collections, Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), are his most accessible work. Behind them grew something far stranger: a sequence of long prophetic poems — among them The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Urizen, Milton, and Jerusalem — in which Blake assembled a complete private mythology. Its cast includes Urizen, the cold lawgiving reason who mistakes himself for God; Los, the imaginative maker; and Albion, the fallen primordial human in whom all of humanity is contained. In this system the divided faculties of one giant being are personified as warring figures, each trailing a female counterpart he called an emanation, and the whole of history is the drama of their fall and reunion.

Blake’s relation to organized religion was combative and idiosyncratic. He read the Swedenborgian writings closely and attended a New Church gathering, then turned on Swedenborg sharply in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, charging him with conventionality. He revered Jesus while rejecting most of the institutional Christianity around him, set imagination above reason as the divine faculty, and attacked Newton, Locke, and Bacon as prophets of a deadening materialism. The overall shape of his myth — a creation gone wrong, a true humanity asleep within the fallen one, redemption as an awakening of vision — has often been read as recognizably gnostic in structure; whether Blake drew on any such source or arrived there on his own is disputed, and his reading is hard to trace.

He died in London in 1827, still poor, reportedly singing. Scholarship has spent the years since assembling his scattered work and debating how far his mythology forms a coherent system as against a body of inspired improvisation. What is not in dispute is that he meant it. He wrote and engraved as though reporting, not inventing, and left the strangeness intact for whoever came after.

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