Born in London on November 28, 1757, Blake received little formal education and displayed a penchant for disregarding authority. He apprenticed as an engraver at the age of 14 in keeping with his natural talent for art and drifted to poetry as an outlet for the visions and imaginary conversations he held with religious figures. The tortures he experienced with long hours and difficult work as an apprentice would find expression in his later poems. But he did learn the profession and, in addition to taking up watercolor painting, Blake engraved illustrations for magazines.
In 1783 he married Catherine Boucher, whom he taught to draw and paint and to use a printing press. She assisted him throughout his career. At the age of 30 Blake produced "Songs of Innocence" as the first major work combining his skills as poet and engraver. This work was followed by "Songs of Experience" in1794. It is poems from these two works, which contain parallels to the harshness of the contemporary preindustrial life, that most modern students study as an introduction to Romantic Poetry. The poems compare the state of youthful innocence with the strident bitterness of experience.
The books were neither a commercial nor a critical success. This often led to feelings of depression. Blake was not averse to attacking contemporary convention, but he did so with a firm belief in his own correctness. Today's readers, with the advantage of historical perspective, see Blake's Innocence and Experience poems, with their lengthy, lyrical language and explosive diatribes, as the expressions of a sympathetic observer of society. To his countrymen, this branded him as an outsider.
In 1790 Blake composed his major prose work entitled "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." He also, with the assistance of his wife, engraved the entire work. Blake intended the work to be a severe criticism of the established labor practices, pollution and immorality of his time; in it he also attacked the conventional British religious views in tersely phrased statements of principle. Some of Blake's contemporaries, upon reading the work, proclaimed Blake a harmless lunatic.
Life did not get easier for Blake as he grew older. He continued publishing and engraving, always the social critic, but with patronage from an admirer he was able to continue, even with a failed printing business and accusations of high treason for supposedly lambasting the king and all his subjects. His poetry was exemplary throughout his career, and late in life he came to be appreciated for his genius by a group of young writers.
Blake died without much fanfare on August 12, 1827, an ignominious end to a poet who would years later come to be greatly revered in literary circles. Fittingly, he was buried in an unmarked grave at Bunhill Fields, near his parents, and suffered the final indignity of having four more bodies placed atop his own over the years. He was never destined to rest in peace, and maybe he'd prefer it that way.