William Blake was born above his father’s hosiery shop in Soho, London, and he never went to an ordinary school. As a boy he told his parents he had seen a tree filled with angels on Peckham Rye, then a common south of the river. He saw visions all his life, and he never doubted them.

At fourteen he was apprenticed to an engraver, and engraving was how he earned his living. He spent years drawing the medieval tombs in Westminster Abbey for his master, and the Gothic shapes stayed in his art. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market gardener, who signed the marriage register with an X. Blake taught her to read and write, and to help him print and color his books. She worked beside him for the rest of his life.

Blake invented his own way of making books. He wrote the words and drew the pictures directly onto copper plates, in reverse, in a substance that resisted acid, so that both stood out in relief when the plate was etched. Then he and Catherine printed each page and colored it by hand. He said the method had been revealed to him in a vision by his younger brother, Robert, who had died young. Every copy was different, and very few were made.

In this way he produced Songs of Innocence (1789) and later Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), short poems that look simple and are not: “The Lamb” and “The Tyger,” the two chimney sweepers, and “London,” with its “mind-forg’d manacles.” He also wrote long, strange prophetic books with their own mythology, which almost nobody understood.

He was poor most of his life. A single exhibition of his paintings, in 1809, was a disaster; one critic called him “an unfortunate lunatic.” A small group of young artists who called themselves “the Ancients” revered him in his last years. He died in 1827, singing, it is said, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Bunhill Fields, London.

Today he is among the best-known poets in English. “And did those feet in ancient time,” a short poem from the preface to his Milton, was set to music as the hymn “Jerusalem” and is sung at English sports matches. In 2018 a stone was finally laid at the spot where he is buried.