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William Blake was born on 28 November 1757 in Soho, London, the third of seven children of James Blake, a hosier, and his wife Catherine. He never went to school beyond learning to read and write; instead he attended Henry Pars’s drawing school in the Strand, and in 1772 he was apprenticed to the engraver James Basire, for whom he drew the tombs of Westminster Abbey. Even as a child he reported visions—a tree filled with angels on Peckham Rye—and he spoke of such visions all his life.
After his apprenticeship Blake studied briefly at the Royal Academy schools and worked as a commercial engraver. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, who could not then sign her name; he taught her to read and write, and she became his devoted helper in printing and colouring his books. Friends paid for his first collection, Poetical Sketches, printed in 1783 with lyrics such as “To the Evening Star” and “How sweet I roamed from field to field.”
In 1788 Blake developed “relief etching,” printing words and pictures together from copper plates and colouring each copy by hand. With it he issued Songs of Innocence (1789) and the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), whose paired poems show “the two contrary states of the human soul.” He also produced the prophetic books—The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, America, Milton, and Jerusalem—whose preface lyric “And did those feet in ancient time” later became the hymn “Jerusalem.” From 1800 to 1803 he lived at Felpham, Sussex, under the patronage of William Hayley, and was tried and acquitted of sedition after a quarrel with a soldier.
Back in London, Blake lived in poverty and near obscurity, sustained by patrons such as Thomas Butts and, late in life, by a circle of young artists around John Linnell and Samuel Palmer. His last great works were engravings for the Book of Job and illustrations to Dante. He died at his rooms in Fountain Court, off the Strand, on 12 August 1827, singing, by his friends’ accounts, and was buried in Bunhill Fields. Largely ignored in his own day, he was revived by Alexander Gilchrist’s 1863 Life and is now counted among the great English Romantics.
The poem texts on Poetry Catalog follow public domain Project Gutenberg editions of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Poetical Sketches, and Blake’s manuscript lyrics, so punctuation and wording may differ slightly from other editions. For the linked list of his poems on this site, visit William Blake Poems.