William Blake was an English writer, poet, and illustrator of the Romantic period. Romantic authors and artists emphasized the content of their works over the form, valued imagination and emotion, and celebrated nature and freedom. Kenneth Muir, writing in the Reference Guide to English Literature, called Blake "one of the best lyrical poets of the last 500 years." His first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, said in his Life of William Blake: Pictor Ignotus that Blake "neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for the work'y-day men at all, rather for children and angels"; he called Blake "`a divine child,' whose playthings were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens and the earth." Prone to mystical visions throughout his life, Blake often incorporated these powerful images into his poems and engravings. His abiding concern with religious matters, and his strong opinions about the corruption of the modern world, are also...