William Blake

William Blake (1757–1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker whose work occupies a singular place in the history of English literature. Writing during the Romantic era, Blake developed a deeply personal mythology and a visual-poetic style that set him apart from his contemporaries. Though largely unrecognized during his lifetime, he is now regarded as one of the most original and influential figures in Western art and literature.

Blake’s poetry is characterized by its visionary intensity, symbolic depth, and a persistent tension between innocence and experience, freedom and oppression, the divine and the human. His two great collections — Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) — present contrasting views of the human condition, exploring how the world looks through the eyes of the uncorrupted child versus the disillusioned adult. Throughout his work, Blake challenged the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the rigid institutions of Church and State, expressing a radical spiritual and political vision that was far ahead of his time.

Among his most celebrated poems is The Tyger, from Songs of Experience. With its hammering rhythms and blazing imagery — “Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night” — the poem poses unanswerable questions about the nature of creation and the force behind it. Who or what could fashion so terrible and magnificent a creature? The poem’s power lies not in its answers, but in the raw energy of its questioning. It stands as one of the most anthologized poems in the English language.

Blake’s legacy extends well beyond poetry. He developed his own method of “illuminated printing,” combining handwritten text with intricate illustration on the same plate, so that image and word formed a unified artistic whole. Works like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and his prophetic books — including Milton and Jerusalem — demonstrate the full ambition of this approach, weaving elaborate mythological systems into both visual and verbal art. Though these longer works were largely ignored in his day, they have since become central texts in the study of Romanticism and visionary literature.

Blake spent most of his life in London, working in relative poverty, and died in 1827 still largely unknown to the wider public. It was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that critics and poets — among them W.B. Yeats — began to champion his work and reveal its extraordinary complexity. Today, Blake is recognized as a prophet of creative freedom and a foundational voice in English poetry, whose influence can be traced through Romanticism, modernism, and beyond.