William Blake was a poet and artist. Born in Soho in the eighteenth century, the son of a shopkeeper, he is now acclaimed as a radical left-field artist. Blake's written work was equally vivid. A major poet of the Romantic age, the full range of his poetry includes the joyful and sorrowful, the childlike and complex and illustrates his original and prophetic vision. Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic opinions, he is now revered for the depth of his poetry and art, and the philosophical undercurrents intrinsic to all his creative work.