William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker.

Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of
both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what
is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry
has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever
produced". Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham he
produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of
God", or "Human existence itself".

Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later
critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents
within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterized as part of both the Romantic
Movement and "Pre-Romantic", for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but
hostile to the Church of England - indeed, to all forms of organized religion - Blake was influenced by
the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Jakob
Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg.

Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The
19th century scholar William Rossetti characterized Blake as a "glorious luminary,” and as "a man not
forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or
readily surmisable successors.

William Blake was born on 28 November 1757 at 28 Broad Street (now Broadwick St) in the Soho
district of London. He was the third of seven children, [11][12] two of whom died in infancy. Blake's
father, James, was a hosier.[12] William attended school only long enough to learn reading and writing,
leaving at the age of ten, and was otherwise educated at home by his mother Catherine Wright
Armitage Blake.[13] The Blakes were Dissenters, and are believed to have belonged to the Moravian
Church. The Bible was an early and profound influence on Blake, and would remain a source of
inspiration throughout his life.

Blake started engraving copies of drawings of Greek antiquities purchased for him by his father, a
practice that was then preferred to actual drawing. Within these drawings Blake found his first
exposure to classical forms through the work of Raphael, Michelangelo, Marten Heemskerk and
Albrecht Dürer. His parents knew enough of his headstrong temperament that he was not sent to
school but was instead enrolled in drawing classes. He read avidly on subjects of his own choosing.
During this period, Blake was also making explorations into poetry; his early work displays
knowledge of Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser.

On 4 August 1772, Blake became apprenticed to engraver James Basire of Great Queen Street, for the
term of seven years. [12] At the end of this period, at the age of 21, he was to become a professional
engraver. No record survives of any serious disagreement or conflict between the two during the
period of Blake's apprenticeship. However, Peter Ackroyd's biography notes that Blake was later to
add Basire's name to a list of artistic adversaries—and then cross it out. [14] This aside, Basire's style of
engraving was of a kind held to be old-fashioned at the time, [15] and Blake's instruction in this
outmoded form may have been detrimental to his acquiring of work or recognition in later life.

After two years, Basire sent his apprentice to copy images from the Gothic churches in London
(perhaps to settle a quarrel between Blake and James Parker, his fellow apprentice). His experiences in
Westminster Abbey helped form his artistic style and ideas. The Abbey of his day was decorated with
suits of armour, painted funeral effigies, and varicoloured waxworks. Ackroyd notes that "...the most
immediate [impression] would have been of faded brightness and colour". [16] In the long afternoons
Blake spent sketching in the Abbey, he was occasionally interrupted by the boys of Westminster
School, one of whom "tormented" Blake so much one afternoon that he knocked the boy off a scaffold
to the ground, "upon which he fell with terrific Violence". [17] Blake beheld more visions in the Abbey,
of a great procession of monks and priests, while he heard "the chant of plain-song and chorale."

On 8 October 1779, Blake became a student at the Royal Academy in Old Somerset House, near the
Strand. While the terms of his study required no payment, he was expected to supply his own
materials throughout the six-year period. There, he rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished
style of fashionable painters such as Rubens, championed by the school's first president, Joshua
Reynolds. Over time, Blake came to detest Reynolds' attitude towards art, especially his pursuit of
"general truth" and "general beauty". Reynolds wrote in his Discourses that the "disposition to
abstractions, to generalising and classification, is the great glory of the human mind"; Blake
responded, in marginalia to his personal copy, that "To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is
the Alone Distinction of Merit".[18] Blake also disliked Reynolds' apparent humility, which he held to
be a form of hypocrisy. Against Reynolds' fashionable oil painting, Blake preferred the Classical
precision of his early influences, Michelangelo and Raphael.

David Bindman suggests that Blake's antagonism towards Reynolds arose not so much from the
president's opinions (like Blake, Reynolds held history painting to be of greater value than landscape
and portraiture), but rather "against his hypocrisy in not putting his ideals into practice." [19] Certainly
Blake was not averse to exhibiting at the Royal Academy, submitting works on six occasions between
1780 and 1808.

Blake became friends with John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard and George Cumberland during his first
year at the Royal Academy. They shared radical views, with Stothard and Cumberland joining the
Society for Constitutional Information.[20]

Blake's first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, records that in June 1780 Blake was walking towards
Basire's shop in Great Queen Street when he was swept up by a rampaging mob that stormed Newgate
Prison in London.[21] They attacked the prison gates with shovels and pickaxes, set the building ablaze,
and released the prisoners inside. Blake was reportedly in the front rank of the mob during this attack.
These riots, in response to a parliamentary bill revoking sanctions against Roman Catholicism, later
came to be known as the Gordon Riots. They provoked a flurry of legislation from the government of
George III, as well as the creation of the first police force.

Despite Gilchrist's insistence that Blake was "forced" to accompany the crowd, some biographers have
argued that he accompanied it impulsively, or supported it as a revolutionary act. [22] In contrast, Jerome
McGann argues that the riots were reactionary, and that events would have provoked "disgust" in
Blake.[23]

Blake met Catherine Boucher in 1782. At the time, Blake was recovering from a relationship that had
culminated in a refusal of his marriage proposal. He recounted the story of his heartbreak for
Catherine and her parents, after which he asked Catherine, "Do you pity me?" When she responded
affirmatively, he declared, "Then I love you." Blake married Catherine – who was five years his junior
– on 18 August 1782 in St. Mary's Church, Battersea. Illiterate, Catherine signed her wedding contract
with an 'X'. The original wedding certificate may still be viewed at the church, where a
commemorative stained-glass window was installed between 1976 and 1982. [24] Later, in addition to
teaching Catherine to read and write, Blake trained her as an engraver. Throughout his life she would
prove an invaluable aid to him, helping to print his illuminated works and maintaining his spirits
throughout numerous misfortunes.

Blake's first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches, was printed around 1783. [25] After his father's
death, William and former fellow apprentice James Parker opened a print shop in 1784, and began
working with radical publisher Joseph Johnson.[26] Johnson's house was a meeting-place for some of
the leading English intellectual dissidents of the time: theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley,
philosopher Richard Price, artist John Henry Fuseli[27] early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and
American revolutionary Thomas Paine. Along with William Wordsworth and William Godwin, Blake
had great hopes for the French revolution and American revolutions and wore a Phrygian cap in
solidarity with the French revolutionaries, but despaired with the rise of Robespierre and the Reign of
Terror in France. In 1784 Blake also composed his unfinished manuscript An Island in the Moon.

Blake illustrated Original Stories from Real Life (1788; 1791) by Mary Wollstonecraft. They seem to
have shared some views on sexual equality and the institution of marriage, but there is no evidence
proving without doubt that they actually met. In 1793's Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Blake
condemned the cruel absurdity of enforced chastity and marriage without love and defended the right
of women to complete self-fulfillment.

In 1788, at the age of 31, Blake began to experiment with relief etching, a method he would use to
produce most of his books, paintings, pamphlets and poems. The process is also referred to as
illuminated printing, and final products as illuminated books or prints. Illuminated printing involved
writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant medium.
Illustrations could appear alongside words in the manner of earlier illuminated manuscripts. He then
etched the plates in acid to dissolve the untreated copper and leave the design standing in relief (hence
the name).

This is a reversal of the normal method of etching, where the lines of the design are exposed to the
acid, and the plate printed by the intaglio method. Relief etching (which Blake also referred to as
"stereotype" in The Ghost of Abel) was intended as a means for producing his illuminated books more
quickly than via intaglio. Stereotype, a process invented in 1725, consisted of making a metal cast
from a wood engraving, but Blake’s innovation was, as described above, very different. The pages
printed from these plates then had to be hand-coloured in water colours and stitched together to make
up a volume. Blake used illuminated printing for most of his well-known works, including Songs of
Innocence and Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem.

Although Blake has become most famous for his relief etching, his commercial work largely consisted
of intaglio engraving, the standard process of engraving in the eighteenth century in which the artist
would incise an image into the copper plate. This was a complex and laborious process, with plates
taking months or years to complete, but as Blake's contemporary, John Boydell, realised, such
engraving offered a "missing link with commerce", enabling artists to connect with a mass audience
and so becoming an immensely important activity by the end of the eighteenth century. [29]

Blake also employed intaglio engraving in his own work, most notably for the illustrations of the Book
of Job, completed just before his death. Most critical work has tended to concentrate on Blake's relief
etching as a technique because it is the most innovative aspect of his art, but a 2009 study draws
attention to Blake's surviving plates, including those for the Book of Job: these demonstrate that he
made frequent use of a technique known as "repoussage", a means of obliterating mistakes by
hammering them out by hitting the back of the plate. Such techniques, typical of engraving work of
the time, are very different to the much faster and fluid way of drawing on a plate that Blake employed
for his relief etching, and indicates why the engravings took so long to complete

Blake's marriage to Catherine remained a close and devoted one until his death. Blake taught
Catherine to write, and she helped him to colour his printed poems. [31] Gilchrist refers to "stormy
times" in the early years of the marriage. [32] Some biographers have suggested that Blake tried to bring
a concubine into the marriage bed in accordance with the beliefs of the more radical branches of the
Swedenborgian Society,[33] but other scholars have dismissed these theories as conjecture. [34] William
and Catherine's first daughter and last child might be Thel described in The Book of Thel who was
conceived as dead.[35]

In 1800, Blake moved to a cottage at Felpham in Sussex (now West Sussex) to take up a job
illustrating the works of William Hayley, a minor poet. It was in this cottage that Blake began Milton:
a Poem (the title page is dated 1804 but Blake continued to work on it until 1808). The preface to this
work includes a poem beginning "And did those feet in ancient time," which became the words for the
anthem, "Jerusalem". Over time, Blake came to resent his new patron, coming to believe that Hayley
was uninterested in true artistry, and preoccupied with "the meer drudgery of business" (E724). Blake's
disenchantment with Hayley has been speculated to have influenced Milton: a Poem, in which Blake
wrote that "Corporeal Friends are Spiritual Enemies." (4:26, E98)

Blake's trouble with authority came to a head in August 1803, when he was involved in a physical
altercation with a soldier called John Schofield. [36] Blake was charged not only with assault, but also
with uttering seditious and treasonable expressions against the King. Schofield claimed that Blake had
exclaimed, "Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves." [37] Blake would be cleared in the Chichester
assizes of the charges. According to a report in the Sussex county paper, "The invented character of
[the evidence] was ... so obvious that an acquittal resulted." [38] Schofield was later depicted wearing
"mind forged manacles" in an illustration to Jerusalem

Blake returned to London in 1804 and began to write and illustrate Jerusalem (1804–1820), his most
ambitious work. Having conceived the idea of portraying the characters in Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales, Blake approached the dealer Robert Cromek, with a view to marketing an engraving. Knowing
that Blake was too eccentric to produce a popular work, Cromek promptly commissioned Blake's
friend Thomas Stothard to execute the concept. When Blake learned that he had been cheated, he
broke off contact with Stothard. He also set up an independent exhibition in his brother's haberdashery
shop at 27 Broad Street in the Soho district of London. The exhibition was designed to market his own
version of the Canterbury illustration (titled The Canterbury Pilgrims), along with other works. As a
result he wrote his Descriptive Catalogue (1809), which contains what Anthony Blunt has called a
"brilliant analysis" of Chaucer. It is regularly anthologised as a classic of Chaucer criticism. [40] It also
contained detailed explanations of his other paintings.

The exhibition itself, however, was very poorly attended, selling none of the temperas or watercolours.
Its only review, in The Examiner, was hostile.[41]

In 1818 he was introduced by George Cumberland's son to a young artist named John Linnell.[42]
Through Linnell he met Samuel Palmer, who belonged to a group of artists who called themselves the
Shoreham Ancients. This group shared Blake's rejection of modern trends and his belief in a spiritual
and artistic New Age. At the age of 65 Blake began work on illustrations for the Book of Job. These
works were later admired by Ruskin, who compared Blake favourably to Rembrandt, and by Vaughan
Williams, who based his ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing on a selection of the illustrations.

Later in his life Blake began to sell a great number of his works, particularly his Bible illustrations, to
Thomas Butts, a patron who saw Blake more as a friend than a man whose work held artistic merit;
this was typical of the opinions held of Blake throughout his life.

The commission for Dante's Divine Comedy came to Blake in 1826 through Linnell, with the ultimate
aim of producing a series of engravings. Blake's death in 1827 would cut short the enterprise, and only
a handful of the watercolours were completed, with only seven of the engravings arriving at proof
form. Even so, they have evoked praise:

The Dante watercolours are among Blake's richest achievements, engaging fully with the problem of
illustrating a poem of this complexity. The mastery of watercolour has reached an even higher level
than before, and is used to extraordinary effect in differentiating the atmosphere of the three states of
being in the poem'.[43]

Blake's The Lovers' Whirlwind illustrates Hell in Canto V of Dante's Inferno

Because the project was never completed, Blake's intent may itself be obscured. Some indicators,
however, bolster the impression that Blake's illustrations in their totality would themselves take issue
with the text they accompany: In the margin of Homer Bearing the Sword and His Companions, Blake
notes, "Every thing in Dantes Comedia shews That for Tyrannical Purposes he has made This World
the Foundation of All & the Goddess Nature & not the Holy Ghost." Blake seems to dissent from
Dante's admiration of the poetic works of ancient Greece, and from the apparent glee with which
Dante allots punishments in Hell (as evidenced by the grim humour of the cantos).

At the same time, Blake shared Dante's distrust of materialism and the corruptive nature of power, and
clearly relished the opportunity to represent the atmosphere and imagery of Dante's work pictorially.
Even as he seemed to near death, Blake's central preoccupation was his feverish work on the
illustrations to Dante's Inferno; he is said to have spent one of the very last shillings he possessed on a
pencil to continue sketching.

On the day of his death, Blake worked relentlessly on his Dante series. Eventually, it is reported, he
ceased working and turned to his wife, who was in tears by his bedside. Beholding her, Blake is said to
have cried, "Stay Kate! Keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been an
angel to me." Having completed this portrait (now lost), Blake laid down his tools and began to sing
hymns and verses.[45] At six that evening, after promising his wife that he would be with her always,
Blake died. Gilchrist reports that a female lodger in the same house, present at his expiration, said, "I
have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel.

Catherine paid for Blake's funeral with money lent to her by Linnell. He was buried five days after his
death – on the eve of his forty-fifth wedding anniversary – at the Dissenter's burial ground in Bunhill
Fields, where his parents were also interred. Present at the ceremonies were Catherine, Edward
Calvert, George Richmond, Frederick Tatham and John Linnell. Following Blake's death, Catherine
moved into Tatham's house as a housekeeper. During this period, she believed she was regularly
visited by Blake's spirit. She continued selling his illuminated works and paintings, but would
entertain no business transaction without first "consulting Mr. Blake". [48] On the day of her own death,
in October 1831, she was as calm and cheerful as her husband, and called out to him "as if he were
only in the next room, to say she was coming to him, and it would not be long now". [49]

On her death, Blake's manuscripts were inherited by Frederick Tatham, who burned several he deemed
heretical or politically radical. Tatham was an Irvingite, one of the many fundamentalist movements of
the 19th century, and was severely opposed to any work that smacked of blasphemy. [50] Also, John
Linnell erased sexual imagery from a number of Blake's drawings. [51]

Since 1965, the exact location of William Blake's grave had been lost and forgotten, while gravestones
were taken away to create a new lawn. Nowadays, Blake’s grave is commemorated by a stone that
reads "Near by lie the remains of the poet-painter William Blake 1757-1827 and his wife Catherine
Sophia 1762-1831". This memorial stone is situated approximately 20 metres away from the actual
spot of Blake’s grave, which is not marked. However, members of the group Friends of William Blake
have rediscovered the location of Blake's grave and intend to place a permanent memorial at the site.
[52][53]

Blake is now recognised as a saint in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica. The Blake Prize for Religious
Art was established in his honour in Australia in 1949. In 1957 a memorial was erected in Westminster
Abbey, in memory of him and his wife.[54]

Because Blake's later poetry contains a private mythology with complex symbolism, his late work has
been less published than his earlier more accessible work. The recent Vintage anthology of Blake
edited by Patti Smith focuses heavily on the earlier work, as do many critical studies such as William
Blake by D. G. Gillham.

The earlier work is primarily rebellious in character and can be seen as a protestation against dogmatic
religion. This is especially notable in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in which the figure
represented by Satan is virtually the hero rebelling against an imposter authoritarian deity. In the later
works such as Milton and Jerusalem, Blake carves a distinctive vision of a humanity redeemed by
self-sacrifice and forgiveness, while retaining his earlier negative attitude towards what he felt was the
rigid and morbid authoritarianism of traditional religion. Not all readers of Blake agree upon how
much continuity exists between Blake's earlier and later works.

Since his death, William Blake has been claimed by various movements who apply his complex and
often elusive use of symbolism and allegory to the issues that concern them. [59]

In particular, Blake is sometimes considered (along with Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband
William Godwin) a forerunner of the subsequent 19th century "free love" movement, a broad reform
tradition starting in the 1820s that held that marriage is slavery, and advocated for removal of all state
restrictions on sexual activity such as homosexuality, prostitution, and adultery, culminating in the
birth control movement of the early 20th century. Blake scholarship was more focused on this theme
in the earlier 20th century than today, although it is still mentioned today notably by the Blake scholar
Magnus Ankarsjö who moderately challenges this interpretation. The 19th century "free love"
movement was not particularly focused on the idea of multiple partners, but did agree with
Wollstonecraft that state-sanctioned marriage was "legal prostitution" and was monopolistic in
character. It has somewhat more in common with early feminist movements[60] (particularly with
regard to the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, whom Blake admired).

Blake was critical of the marriage laws of his day, and generally railed against traditional Christian
notions of chastity as a virtue. At a time of tremendous strain in his marriage, in part due to Catherine's
apparent inability to bear children, he directly advocated bringing a second wife into the house. His
poetry suggests that external demands for marital fidelity reduce love to mere duty rather than
authentic affection, and decries jealousy and egotism as a motive for marriage laws. Poems such as
"Why should I be bound to thee, O my lovely Myrtle-tree?" and "Earth's Answer" seem to advocate
multiple sexual partners. His poem "London" speaks of "the Marriage-Hearse". Visions of the
Daughters of Albion is widely (though not universally) read as a tribute to free love since the
relationship between Bromion and Oothoon is held together only by laws and not by love. For Blake,
law and love are opposed, and he castigates the "frozen marriage-bed

Some scholars have noted both that Blake's views on “free love” are both qualified and may have
undergone shifts and modifications in his late years. Some poems from this period warn of dangers of
predatory sexuality such as The Sick Rose. Magnus Ankarsjö notes that while the hero of Visions of the
Daughters of Albion is a strong advocate of free love, by the end of the poem she has become more
circumspect as her awareness of the dark side of sexuality has grown, crying "Can this be love which
drinks another as a sponge drinks water?" [71] Ankarsjö also notes that a major inspiration to Blake,
Mary Wollstonecraft, similarly developed more circumspect views of sexual freedom late in life. In
light of Blake's aforementioned sense of human 'fallenness' Ankarsjö thinks Blake does not fully
approve of sensual indulgence merely in defiance of law as exemplified by the female character of
Leutha,[72] since in the fallen world of experience all love is enchained. [73] Ankarsjö records Blake as
having supported a commune with some sharing of partners, though David Worrall has recently read
The Book of Thel as a rejection of the proposal to take concubines espoused by some members of the
Swedenborgian church.[74]

Blake's later writings show a renewed interest in Christianity, and although he radically reinterprets
Christian morality in a way that embraces sensual pleasure, there is little of the emphasis on sexual
libertarianism found in several of his early poems, and there is advocacy of "self-denial", though such
abnegation must be inspired by love rather than through authoritarian compulsion. [75] Berger (moreso
than Swinburne) is especially sensitive to a shift in sensibility between the early Blake and the later
Blake. Berger believes the young Blake placed too much emphasis on following impulses, [76] and that
the older Blake had a better formed ideal of a true love that sacrifices self. Some celebration of
mystical sensuality remains in the late poems (most notably in Blake's denial of the virginity of Jesus'
mother). However, the late poems also place a greater emphasis on forgiveness, redemption, and
emotional authenticity as a foundation for relationships

Although Blake's attacks on conventional religion were shocking in his own day, his rejection of
religiosity was not a rejection of religion per se. His view of orthodoxy is evident in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, a series of texts written in imitation of Biblical prophecy.

Jesus, for Blake, symbolises the vital relationship and unity between divinity and humanity: "All had
originally one language, and one religion: this was the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel.
Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus." (Descriptive Catalogue, Plate 39, E543)

Blake designed his own mythology, which appears largely in his prophetic books. Within these Blake
describes a number of characters, including 'Urizen', 'Enitharmon', 'Bromion' and 'Luvah'. This
mythology seems to have a basis in the Bible and in Greek mythology, [77] and it accompanies his ideas
about the everlasting Gospel.

Blake does not subscribe to the notion of a body distinct from the soul that must submit to the rule of
the soul, but sees the body as an extension of the soul, derived from the 'discernment' of the senses.
Thus, the emphasis orthodoxy places upon the denial of bodily urges is a dualistic error born of
misapprehension of the relationship between body and soul. Elsewhere, he describes Satan as the 'state
of error', and as beyond salvation.[78]

Blake opposed the sophistry of theological thought that excuses pain, admits evil and apologises for
injustice. He abhorred self-denial, [79] which he associated with religious repression and particularly
sexual repression:[80] "Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. / He who desires but acts
not, breeds pestilence." (7.4-5, E35) He saw the concept of 'sin' as a trap to bind men’s desires (the
briars of Garden of Love), and believed that restraint in obedience to a moral code imposed from the
outside was against the spirit of life:

He did not hold with the doctrine of God as Lord, an entity separate from and superior to mankind; [81]
this is shown clearly in his words about Jesus Christ: "He is the only God ... and so am I, and so are
you." A telling phrase in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is "men forgot that All deities reside in the
human breast". This is very much in line with his belief in liberty and social equality in society and
between the sexes.

From a young age, William Blake claimed to have seen visions. The first of these visions may have
occurred as early as the age of four when, according to one anecdote, the young artist "saw God" when
God "put his head to the window", causing Blake to break into screaming. [88] At the age of eight or ten
in Peckham Rye, London, Blake claimed to have seen "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings
bespangling every bough like stars."[88] According to Blake's Victorian biographer Gilchrist, he
returned home and reported this vision, and he only escaped being thrashed by his father for telling a
lie through the intervention of his mother. Though all evidence suggests that his parents were largely
supportive, his mother seems to have been especially so, and several of Blake's early drawings and
poems decorated the walls of her chamber. On another occasion, Blake watched haymakers at work,
and thought he saw angelic figures walking among them. [88]

The Ghost of a Flea, 1819-1820. Having informed painter-astrologer John Varley of his visions of
apparitions, Blake was subsequently persuaded to paint one of them. [89] Varley's anecdote of Blake and
his vision of the flea's ghost became well-known. [89]
Blake claimed to experience visions throughout his life. They were often associated with beautiful
religious themes and imagery, and therefore may have inspired him further with spiritual works and
pursuits. Certainly, religious concepts and imagery figure centrally in Blake's works. God and
Christianity constituted the intellectual centre of his writings, from which he drew inspiration. In
addition, Blake believed that he was personally instructed and encouraged by Archangels to create his
artistic works, which he claimed were actively read and enjoyed by those same Archangels

Blake's work was neglected for a generation after his death and was almost forgotten when Alexander
Gilchrist began work on his biography in the 1860s. The publication of the Life of William Blake
rapidly transformed Blake's reputation, in particular as he was taken up by Pre-Raphaelites and
associated figures, in particular Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. It was in the
twentieth century, however, that Blake's work was fully appreciated and his influence increased.
Important early and mid twentieth-century scholars involved in enhancing Blake's standing in literary
and artistic circles included S. Foster Damon, Geoffrey Keynes, Northrop Frye, David V. Erdman and
G. E. Bentley, Jr.

While Blake had a significant role to play in the art and poetry of figures such as Rossetti, it was
during the Modernist period that this work began to influence a wider set of writers and artists.
William Butler Yeats, who edited an edition of Blake's collected works in 1893, drew on him for
poetic and philosophical ideas,[92] while British surrealist art in particular drew on Blake's conceptions
of non-mimetic, visionary practice in the painting of artists such as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland.
[93]
His poetry also came into use by a number of British classical composers such as Benjamin Britten
and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who set his works.

Many such as June Singer have argued that Blake's thoughts on human nature greatly anticipate and
parallel the thinking of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, although Jung dismissed Blake's works as "an
artistic production rather than an authentic representation of unconscious processes." [94] Similarly,
although less popularly, Diana Hume George has claimed that Blake can be seen as a precursor to the
ideas of Sigmund Freud.[95]

Blake had an enormous influence on the beat poets of the 1950s and the counterculture of the 1960s,
frequently being cited by such seminal figures as beat poet Allen Ginsberg and songwriters Bob
Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Van Morrison. Much of the central conceit of Phillip Pullman's fantasy
trilogy His Dark Materials is rooted in the world of Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. After
World War II, Blake's role in popular culture has come to the fore in a variety of areas such as popular
music, film, and the graphic novel, leading Edward Larrissy to assert that "Blake is the Romantic
writer who has exerted the most powerful influence on the twentieth century