William Blake

William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter and printmaker, counted among the six major English Romantic poets alongside Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. Unusually, he achieved lasting recognition in both literature and visual art, hand-producing his illuminated books by combining engraved text with his own painted imagery, so that each poem existed alongside a visual counterpart that could shift its meaning across different printed copies.

His best-known work, «Songs of Innocence and of Experience», was originally issued as two separate volumes before being combined, contrasting a childlike, pastoral vision of the world with a darker, more critical one shaped by social and institutional corruption. Poems such as «The Tyger», «London», «A Poison Tree» and the paired «Chimney Sweeper» poems exemplify this dual perspective, marrying simple, songlike form with unsettling moral and political undercurrents.

Blake's radical political and religious views, along with his intensely visionary, sometimes hallucinatory sensibility, made him a marginal and often misunderstood figure in his own lifetime, with only a small circle recognizing the scope of his achievement. His reputation grew substantially after his death, and he is now regarded as one of the most original and influential figures in English poetry and art, celebrated for fusing personal mysticism with sharp social critique.