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William Blake, Poet and Painter > 
William Blake was a British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. Blake proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th- century. Misunderstanding shadowed his career as a writer and artist and it was left to later generations to recognize his importance.
Blake's first book of poems, Poetical Sketches, appeared in 1783 and was followed by Songs of Innocence (1789), and Songs of Experience (1794). His most famous poem "The Tyger", was part of his Songs of Experience. In these works the world is seen from a child's point of view, but they also function as parables of adult experience.
Blake engraved and published most of his major works himself. Famous among his "Prophetic Books" are The Book of Thel (1789) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, (1790) The Book of Urizen,(1794) America (1793), Milton(1804-8)and Jerusalem. (1804-20). In the "Prophetic Books", Blake expressed his lifelong concern with the struggle of the soul to free its natural energies from reason and organized religion. Among Blake's later artistic works are drawings and engravings for Dante's Divine Comedy and the 21 illustrations to the book of Job, which was completed when he was almost 70 years old.
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