English poet and painter, visionary of a self-made mythology
An English poet, painter, and printmaker, a wholly singular genius. He claimed to see angels and visions, and spent his life immersed in a self-made mythology and religious imagination, fusing poem and image into one. His style is strange and gorgeous, full of burning imagination; almost no one understood him in his lifetime, yet after his death he was revered as a prophet of Romanticism and Surrealism — a man who built a whole universe of his own from his visions.
Blake said that as a child he saw "a tree filled with angels," and insisted all his life that he could behold spirits and visions with his own eyes. The world took him for a madman, but he painted by these visions his whole life. It was this misunderstood obsession that let him build a mythic world unprecedented and wholly his own.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.