William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, engraver, painter and printmaker whose work combined text and image in a highly individual form of illuminated printing. Born in London in 1757, he trained as an engraver and spent most of his life earning a precarious living from commercial illustration while producing books such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Milton and Jerusalem largely outside the mainstream literary market.

Blake developed a complex personal mythology and a radical religious imagination that rejected conventional materialism, coercive authority and narrow institutional Christianity. He sympathised with aspects of revolutionary politics while reacting critically to violence and tyranny. During his lifetime he was known to a relatively small circle, but later critics and artists elevated him into a major Romantic poet and visual artist. His prophetic books, lyric poems and relief etchings are now treated as an integrated body of literary and artistic work.

Tracy Chevalier’s Burning Bright makes Blake and his Lambeth household historical neighbours of the fictional Kellaway family, using his printing, politics and visionary imagination within the story. Peter Ackroyd’s non-fiction The English Soul discusses Blake within a broader exploration of English cultural identity, making the poet’s religious dissent, visual symbolism and distinctive mythology relevant beyond strictly literary biography.