BLAKE, WILLIAM. – English poet, engraver, and painter, b. in Londra on 28 November 1757, d. in Strand on 12 August 1827. In childhood he was influenced by Swendenborg’s mysticism and was subject to hallucinations, which were later to influence the strange symbolism of part of his poetic production. After two years of apprenticeship in an engraver’s workshop, in 1778 he enrolled at the Royal Academy, where he devoted himself to drawing, fascinated by the masterpieces of Gothic art.
In 1783 he published the Poetical Sketches, a clear, though astonished, gaze upon creation; in 1784 he opened a print shop, for which he adopted a new method of engraving, illustrating his own poems and the masterpieces of Cervantes, Dante, Milton, Young’s Night Thoughts, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, and the Libro di Giobbe. He died almost penniless. Manuscripts and unpublished drawings were burned because they were considered the work of the devil. Unknown until Rossetti and Swinburne rediscovered him in the second half of the nineteenth century, B. possessed a powerful imagination, which enabled him to embody the most abstract ideas in human forms and transform the most concrete realities into symbol and allegory, according to his idea that «everything exists only in the human imagination». As a poet he was uneven: at times simple and rough, or grandly evocative, as in the Songs of Innocence (1789) and the Songs of Experience (1794); at other times nebulous and hermetic, as in the Prophetic Books. Likewise, in his drawings the robust classical manner derived from Michelangelo is twisted into a dark and violent romantic fury: the illustrations to the Divina Commedia are typical. From the religious point of view, while his rationalism and immoralism link him to the Enlightenment thinkers and to De Sade (anticipating Baudelaire’s Satanism in Marriage of Heaven and Hell), through his faith in the preternatural, however magical and visionary, he presents himself as a kind of prophet, proclaiming himself inspired by God and in contact with angels and saints.