William Blake

William Blake was born in London on 28 November 1757 and spent nearly his entire life there, aside from three years in Felpham, working as a poet, painter, and printmaker in practical obscurity. He called his major works "prophetic", weaving a symbolic cosmology that treated imagination as "the body of God" - a vision his contemporaries dismissed as insanity. Hostile to the Church of England and inflamed by the French and American Revolutions, he kept company with Thomas Paine and drew on Emanuel Swedenborg, though his singularity resists easy lineage. His wife Catherine Boucher worked beside him for forty-five years as printmaker and colourist, making the illuminated books physically possible. Blake died on 12 August 1827, and the Romantic Age later claimed him - Northrop Frye and William Michael Rossetti among those who recognised the glorious luminary no predecessor had forestalled and no successor could replace.