William Blake
"Saw angels in a tree at age eight, built an entire private mythology across his illuminated prophetic books, and died almost entirely unrecognised as an artist."
William Blake was born in London in 1757 to a hosier and reported vivid visionary experiences from early childhood — famously claiming, at around age eight or nine, to have seen a tree filled with angels on Peckham Rye, an experience his father reportedly threatened to beat out of him for lying. These visions continued throughout his life, and Blake treated them not as delusion or metaphor but as literal, if not always ordinarily physical, perception.
Trained as an engraver, Blake developed a distinctive technique he called illuminated printing — etching text and image together onto copper plates, then hand-colouring each printed page individually, so that no two copies of his books were ever quite identical. He used this laborious, self-controlled process to produce and publish his own prophetic books, an interconnected cycle of invented mythology populated by figures of his own creation — Urizen, Los, Orc, Enitharmon — dramatising his ideas about reason, repression, creativity and liberation.
Blake supported himself modestly as a commercial engraver and illustrator throughout his life, receiving almost no recognition as a poet or visionary artist during his own lifetime; he died in 1827 largely unknown outside a small circle of admirers, and it took roughly a century for his full stature to be recognised.
Blake's central and most radical claim was that imagination is not fantasy but the actual body of God at work in human beings — that the imaginative faculty, not reason, is the true organ of spiritual perception, and that a civilisation built on rationalist materialism (which he personified as the tyrannical god-figure Urizen) had systematically suppressed this deeper way of seeing. 'If the doors of perception were cleansed,' he wrote, 'everything would appear to man as it is, infinite' — a line later borrowed directly by Aldous Huxley for the title of his own mescaline memoir.
His invented mythology in the prophetic books — Los the eternal blacksmith-prophet, Urizen the false, restrictive god of pure reason, Orc the spirit of revolutionary energy — functioned as a complete alternative theology, built entirely from his own visionary material rather than drawn from any existing tradition, dramatising an ongoing cosmic struggle between imaginative liberation and rationalist repression that Blake believed was playing out both within every individual soul and across the political upheavals of his own revolutionary era.
Essential Works
Core Contributions
The Shadow Side
Blake's invented mythology is genuinely, notoriously difficult — the prophetic books are dense with private symbolism that even careful modern scholarship still disputes in places, and casual readers can find them close to impenetrable without substantial secondary guidance. This obscurity was arguably part of why he went almost entirely unread in his own time.
His visionary claims also raise the same interpretive question that recurs across this section: contemporaries who knew him described a man who was, by the standards of his day, considered eccentric to the point of possible madness — his wife reportedly said she had 'very little of Mr. Blake's company; he is always in Paradise.' Whether to read his visions as literal perception, as a specific and unusual cognitive experience, or as a self-consciously chosen creative mode remains genuinely open, and Blake's own writing resists a single settled answer.