WILLIAM BLAKE. – English poet, engraver, and painter, b. in London on 28 Nov. 1757, d. in Strand on 12 Aug. 1827. In his childhood he was influenced by the mysticism of Swedenborg and was subject to hallucinations, which were later to affect the strange symbolism found in part of his poetic output. 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, if awestruck, 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 masterworks of Cervantes, Dante, Milton, Young’s *Night Thoughts*, Sterne’s *Sentimental Journey through France and Italy*, and the *Book of Job*. He died nearly destitute. Manuscripts and unpublished drawings were burned, deemed the work of the devil. Unknown until Rossetti and Swinburne rediscovered him in the second half of the 19th century, Blake possessed a powerful imagination, which enabled him to embody the most abstract ideas in human forms and to transform the most concrete realities into symbols and allegories, in accordance with his belief 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 times obscure and hermetic, as in the *Prophetic Books*. Similarly, in his drawings, the robust classical manner drawn from Michelangelo is twisted into a dark and violent Romantic fury: typical are his illustrations of the *Divine Comedy*. From a religious standpoint, while his rationalism and immoralism aligned him with the Enlightenment and the Marquis de Sade (anticipating Baudelaire’s Satanism in *The Marriage of Heaven and Hell*), his faith in the preternatural—albeit magical and visionary—cast him as a kind of prophet, affirming himself as inspired by God and in communion with angels and saints.