William Blake

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland · 1757–1827

William Blake was an English poet, painter and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake has become a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his "prophetic works" were said by the 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the [English] language". While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "human existence itself".