Blake · A Biography

Born in 1757, the son of a London hosier was William Blake -- poet, painter,

and engraver -- possessed one of the most original and fertile creative

geniuses of his age. Yet his strange aloofness and claims of supernatural

visions caused many in his own time and since to doubt his sanity, and much of

his astonishing poetry and visual art remains unfamiliar. Now, Peter Ackroyd

gives us a biography of the enigmatic 18th-century master, clarifying at last

the true nature of Blake's extraordinary life and art. Ackroyd's narrative

traces Blake's progression from his childhood in a Dissenting household,

through his apprenticeship as an engraver and his studies at the newly formed

Royal Academy Schools, to his full maturity, during which he produced his

great masterpieces -- "Songs of Innocence and Experience," "Jerusalem," and

"Milton," to name only a few -- works that were as neglected during his

lifetime as they are celebrated today. Re-creating time and place as only he

can, Ackroyd locates Blake in the complex context of his external world -- a

cross section of 18th-century London inflamed by various forms of radicalism,

mysticism, and sexual magic, squarely opposed to the age's prevailing faith in

rationalism. But he also shows us the cockney visionary as the creator of his

own lavish interior world, a universe filled with angels and spirits. It is in

Blake's utterly unique art that these two worlds meet, as Ackroyd reveals in

his dazzling interpretations of Blake's poetry and the many paintings and

engravings beautifully reproduced in this volume.