William Blake

Who Was William Blake?

William Blake was the most visionary and theologically strange of the English Romantic poets — a printmaker, engraver, and poet whose work was largely unrecognized in his lifetime and has been both celebrated and misread ever since. Born in London to a Nonconformist family, he had visions from childhood and never lost them: he claimed to see angels in trees, to converse with the dead, and to receive poetic dictation from supernatural sources. His entire life was organized around the conviction that the imagination is the primary mode of access to divine truth.

Blake’s mythology is one of the most elaborate and idiosyncratic in literary history. His prophetic books — The Book of Urizen, Milton, Jerusalem — deploy a cast of mythological figures that embody competing aspects of human nature and history, in a cosmic drama that Blake understood as the story of the human fall from imaginative unity into fragmentation and its eventual redemption through art and spiritual vision.

The shorter poems — Songs of Innocence and Experience, the proverbs of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell — are more accessible but equally charged. The contrast between Innocence and Experience is not simply the contrast between youth and adulthood; it is a theological contrast between two ways of perceiving reality — one that sees through the world to its divine source, one that is locked in the material and institutional surfaces of things.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Songs of Innocence and Experience — 1789/1794
• The Marriage of Heaven and Hell — c. 1790–1793
• The Book of Urizen — 1794
• Milton — 1804–1811
• Jerusalem — 1804–1820