William Blake

William Blake (1757–1827) was an English poet, painter and engraver, born in London, the son of a hosier, who saw visions from childhood and was apprenticed to an engraver at fourteen. He printed and hand-colored his own books by a method he said his dead brother had shown him in a dream: Songs of Innocence (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Songs of Experience (1794) and the long prophetic poems Milton and Jerusalem. He was tried for sedition and acquitted in 1804, and lived in poverty, regarded by most contemporaries as mad. He died singing. His reputation as one of the great English poets was made by later generations.