In his prophetic books, William Blake (1757-1827) was a visionary who can be compared without blasphemy to the prophets of the Old Testament. In his life as a citizen of London, he was an unreconstructed revolutionary of the human spirit. And in the poems of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, he was the purest and most penetration lyricist in the language. Among the great English poets, he was and remains the one unclassifiable original.
