November 28, 1757: William Blake is born.
Although several decades older than many of the individuals who are traditionally regarded as the leading figures of the English Romantic movement, William Blake was one of the famous and influential poets of the era. Blake was both an artist and poet, and his works generally combined words and illustrations in a highly visual form of poetry in a manner that recalls the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Blake was not a notable figure during his own life, and although his poem “The Tyger” is one of the most anthologized poems in the English language, his later body of work has been described as “in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language”. Rather less accessible compared to his earlier and more commercial works, Blake’s “prophetic books” contained a rich mythology of his own invention. Ideologically Blake is difficult to categorize. He championed abolitionism and “free love”; he may have also been an early kind of anarchist; he was fervently religious but disdained conventional, organized religion, and he believed that orthodoxy in religion wrongly suppressed natural bodily urges that he argued were simple extensions of the soul. Blake’s impassioned and sometimes radical views shaped his work, but they may have also prevented him from achieving any mainstream recognition during his own lifetime.