William Blake

Works

Biography

William Blake (November 28, 1757–August 12, 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Though largely unrecognised during his lifetime, today Blake’s work, produced in partnership with his wife Catherine, is widely known. According to Northrop Frye, who undertook a study of Blake’s entire poetic opus, his prophetic poems form “what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the [English] language”. Others have praised Blake’s visual artistry, in particular his engravings: “[Blake] is far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced” [1]. In recent years, a memorial was erected for him and his wife.

Viewing Blake’s accomplishments in either poetry or in the visual arts separately is to do him a disservice; Blake himself saw these two disciplines as being companions in a unified spiritual endeavour, and they are inseparable in a proper appreciation of his work. His life is, perhaps, summed up by his statement that “The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself”; though this alone does not do justice to the originality of his thought, nor the determination with which he pursued it.