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William Blake was an English poet, painter and engraver. He was born in London in 1757 and was the son of a hosier. Because Blake was born into a very poor family, he was not schooled. At an early age, he taught himself how to read and write. He wanted to become a painter as a child, and had started to collect prints at the age of twelve. It was around then that he started to write poetry. His family sent him to a good drawing school when he was ten, recognizing that he was quite special. By the age of fourteen, he became an apprentice to an engraver named James Basire.

Blake married Catherine Boucher in 1782, and they set up a printer's shop in 1784 with two others. Blake's first volume, Poetical Sketches, was released in 1783, and was financed by a friend from college, John Flaxman. However, his printer's shop was forced to close after three years.

Blake became an engraver and illustrator, surviving on practically nothing for the rest of his life. He and his wife printed and engraved Songs of Innocence, perhaps his most famous volume at home. It was released in 1789. Blake's early work showed his unique ideological characteristics that became more pronounced in his later poetry. Songs of Experience was the opposite of Songs of Innocence. It was released in 1794, and contained some of the same titles of poems in Songs of Innocence but with perverted words to make them seem darker and nastier. Blake was very pre-occupied with what he called "the two contrary states of the human soul", innocence and experience, or light or dark, and this shows through a lot in his poetry. Blake illustrated all his poetry with pictures that require the reader to look in depth at what the words really meant in relation to the picture. It was his "trademark" in the business.

The main projects of Blake's career were what have now been dubbed "The Prophetic Books". He created symbolic characters that represented his social concerns. Such poems as The French Revolution and Europe, a Prophecy (1791 and 1793) showed his feelings about the state of politics and social issues of the day and his feelings towards "literary constraint". Blake was a very free thinker, with some radical ideas even by today's standards. He was even arrested in 1803, for having "uttered seditious and treasonable expressions, such as 'D-n the King, d-n all his subjects'".

Although he was a Christian, he rebelled against a lot of the teachings of the church. He believed in free sex, and free lots of things, and his rebellion against "theological tyrannt", which demanded one way of religious thinking. This is clearly set out in The Book of Urizen (1794).

Blake died in 1827 widely unknown and unread, and was considered by the more traditional poets of the age, like Wordsworth, to have been insane. It was later in the 19th century that his work was rediscovered and resurrected by W.M. Rosetti and Algernon Swinbourne. Today, his work has influenced, among others, The Beat Generation of the 1950s, W.H. Auden and Emily Dickinson.

Biography by Seerdon
Submitted on 8.05.02