10 Interesting Facts about William Blake

If you love to read or write a poem, then you should better read one of these following facts about William Blake. Blake’s collection of works are really great to read. He was one of the best poets, painters and print-makers. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form “what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language”. To get to know more about him, here are some other facts about William Blake you may like.

Facts about William Blake 1: Early Life

Apart from a brief spell in West Sussex, Blake, born in Soho in November 1757, lived his life in various homes in the capital, both north and south of the river. Only 17 South Molton Street, however, has survived the demolition ball.

Facts about William Blake 2: Songs of Innocence and Experience

A contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge, his poetry is taught in schools in works such as ‘The Tyger’ from his Songs of Innocence and Experience, causing children over the years to complain about the rubbish rhyme of “what immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry”.

Facts about William Blake 3: 100 Greatest Britons

Keen-eyed viewers would have registered him at number 38 in the BBC’s recent public vote for the 100 Greatest Britons – unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge and fellow painters Constable and Turner, none of whom made the list.

Facts about William Blake 4: Jerusalem

Blake is loved at least in part for the poem that became the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ during World War I. Its indelible opening line about feet is famously matched by its “chariot of fire” and “bow of burning gold” references. At the time of its conception, however, he was also awaiting trial for supposedly making insulting remarks about the king and praising Napoleon to a soldier.

Facts about William Blake 5: Image

His image as a wild man of art, an outsider and dissenter, has boosted his appeal over the years, as have the facts of his birth and upbringing: the son of a hosier, who came from the wrong class to be an artist and trained instead as a humble engraver.

Facts about William Blake 6: Blake Gallery

Blake the painter, meanwhile, can be found on permanent display in Tate Britain, which created the first ever Blake Gallery in the 1920s.

Facts about William Blake 7: Sixth Sense of Imagination

As a writer and thinker Blake espoused the value of humanity and played a crucial role in developing our understanding of the ‘sixth sense’ of imagination. “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”, he said in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, influencing the writer Aldous Huxley and a certain LA rock band called The Doors among others.

Facts about William Blake 8: Radical

So radical were his thoughts that many considered him mad. A view not helped by Blake’s claims to have seen visions from an early age of God, various angels and, on one occasion, Satan himself, in an encounter on the staircase of his South Molton Street home.

Facts about William Blake 9: Death

The final years of his life, until his near pennyless death in 1827, were spent behind the Savoy hotel in what was then Fountain Court, an alleyway referred to today as Savoy Buildings.

Facts about William Blake 10: London Changing

Superficially, London has changed a great deal since his day. But to his admirers, Blake’s spirit still hovers in the streets and alleys and in the air. A guided walk regularly visits his haunts in central London, while a two-year project in Lambeth has created a series of Blake-inspired mosaics in a tunnel near the poet’s former home in Hercules Road SE1.

Those who love to read literature works may have considered those following facts about William Blake really useful. Hope you would find those William Blake facts really interesting.