William Blake was born on November 28, 1757, the third child of seven children of a London merchant, James Blake. Showing an artistic impulse from an early age, Blake abandoned formal schooling around the age of ten and enrolled in a drawing school. At fourteen he was apprenticed to the London master engraver James Bashire, under whose care for seven years he learned the intricate techniques of engraving, etching, and printing.

Although Blake left school early, he had an inquisitive mind and was a voracious reader, especially of the Milton, Shakespeare, and other major poets. By the age of twelve he had begun to write his own poetry and he also tried his hand at drama and composed essays on many subjects. In 1783, when Blake was twenty-five, a group of friends published a collection of his juvenile verse, his first appearance in print. By this time, however, Blake was firmly committed to his art, having produced his first independent print when he was sixteen. He did not publish his first work until 1788, when he was thirty-one.

In 1782 Blake married Catherine Boucher, the uneducated daughter of a gardener in Battersea, who, despite her illiteracy would prove an ideal wife and assistant to Blake in his art. Faced with providing for a wife, Blake in 1784 opened a London printshop in partnership with another engraver, taking in his younger brother Robert as an apprentice. Robert's untimely death in 1787 at the age of nineteen devastated Blake.

Songs of Innocence was one of William Blakes's most famous works. The Songs of Innocence dramatize the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children and trace their transformation as the child grows into adulthood. Some of the poems are written from the perspective of children, while others are about children as seen from an adult perspective. Many of the poems draw attention to the positive aspects of natural human understanding prior to the corruption and distortion of experience. Others take a more critical stance toward innocent purity.

Some of William Blake's Works:

• POETICAL SKETCHES, 1783
• THERE IS NO NATURAL RELIGION, c. 1788
• ALL RELIGIONS ARE ONE, c. 1788
• SONGS OF INNOCENCE, 1789
• BOOK OF THEL, 1789
• THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: A POEM IN SEVEN BOOKS, c. 1791
• MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, 1793 - Taivaan ja helvetin avioliitto
• VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION, 1793
• AMERICA: A PROPHECY, 1793
• SONGS OF EXPERIENCE, 1794
• THE BOOK OF URIZEN, 1794
• THE SONG OF LOS, 1794
• THE BOOK OF AHANIA, 1795
• THE BOOK OF LOS, 1795
• Edward Young: NIGHT TOUGHTS, 1797 (537 coloured illustrations)
• MILTON, 1804- 08
• EVERLASTING GOSPEL, 1818?
• JERUSALEM, 1820
• THE GHOST OF ABEL, 1822
• DANTE'S DIVINE COMEDY (illustration, unfinished) 1825
• ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE BOOK OF JOB, 1826
• WORKS, 1893 (ed. by E.J. Ellis, W.B. Yeats)
• POETICAL WORKS, 1913
• THE PROPHETIC WRITINGS, 1926
• THE COMPLETE WRITINGS, 1957
• THE LETTERS, 1957
• POETRY AND PROSE, 1961
• THE COMPLETE POETRY AND POEMS OF WILLIAM BLAKE, 1965
• POETRY AND DESIGNS, 1979
• THE COMPLETE POETRY AND POEMS OF WILLIAM BLAKE, 1982 (rev. ed., critical commentary by Harold Bloom)
• POEMS AND PROPHECIES, 1991