English poet, engraver, and visionary whose work, ignored almost entirely in his lifetime, has become one of the indispensable counter-traditions of modern English-language thought: radical, dissenting, anti-rationalist in a specific and careful sense, and absolutely hostile to industrialism, empire, and the policed religion of the established church. Born in Soho to a hosier of Dissenting (probably Moravian) sympathies, apprenticed at fourteen to an engraver, and self-taught as a reader of Milton, the Bible, the Gnostics, Paracelsus, and Swedenborg, Blake spent most of his life in tiny rented rooms in London with his wife Catherine, engraving, printing, and selling — when anyone bought — the illuminated books in which he had fused text and image into a single handmade medium. He died in 1827 singing, according to the friend who was present.
The short lyrics — the Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) — are how most readers come to him, and they are enough to make the case: "The Tyger," "London," "The Chimney Sweeper," "The Garden of Love," "The Sick Rose." Their apparent simplicity conceals an exacting theology of moral vision, in which innocence and experience are not sequential stages of a life but contrary states of the soul, each without the other a lie. The same doubleness — the refusal to settle for single vision — animates The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c.1790), a prose-and-proverb squib against Swedenborg and the pieties of rational religion, the source of "Energy is Eternal Delight" and "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Behind and beyond these sit the prophetic books — America: A Prophecy, Europe, The Book of Urizen, the vast unfinished Four Zoas, and the late Milton and Jerusalem — in which Blake constructed an entire mythological system (Urizen the cold reasoner, Los the imagination-as-blacksmith, Orc the revolutionary fire, Albion the fallen giant of England) as an alternative to what he called the "mind-forg'd manacles" of state, priest, and mill owner.
His politics were radical and dissenting. He walked the streets of London in a red cap during the early 1790s, defended Tom Paine from arrest, was himself tried (and acquitted) for sedition in 1803, and wrote — in Milton — the stanzas that became "Jerusalem," the unofficial English socialist hymn about building a new commonwealth "in England's green & pleasant Land" against the dark Satanic mills of industrial capitalism. The book E.P. Thompson wrote about him at the end of his life, Witness Against the Beast (1993), reads Blake back into the radical antinomian traditions of English Dissent — Muggletonians, Ranters, Swedenborgians — and restores him, against both the aesthete and the Jungian readings, as a specific political thinker out of a specific underground tradition. Yeats, Ginsberg, and a long line of visionary poets have read him as a forebear; the bearable English Left has read him as ancestor and conscience.