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William Blake, "London"

BIOGRAPHY

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[From The Norton Introduction to Literature]

(1757–1828)

The son of a London haberdasher and his wife, William Blake studied drawing at ten and at fourteen was apprenticed to an engraver for seven years. After a first book of poems, Poetical Sketches (1783), he began experimenting with what he called “illuminated printing”—the words and pictures of each page were engraved in relief on copper, which was used to print sheets that were then partly colored by hand—a laborious and time-consuming process that resulted in books of singular beauty, no two of which were exactly alike. His great Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) were produced in this manner, as were his increasingly mythic and prophetic books, including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), The Four Zoas (1803), Milton (1804), and Jerusalem (1809). Blake devoted his later life to pictorial art, illustrating The Canterbury Tales, the Book of Job, and The Divine Comedy, on which he was hard at work when he died

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