William Blake came into the world on 28 November 1757 in London, a city that would remain the backdrop of his entire life. He grew up in an era when the currents of Romanticism were beginning to reshape how artists and writers thought about imagination, nature, and human experience, and Blake would become one of the figures associated with that movement. His education took him through Henry Pars Drawing School and later the Royal Academy of Arts, where he developed the technical foundations that would underpin decades of work across several disciplines.

What made Blake unusual was the sheer range of his practice. He worked simultaneously as a poet, painter, printmaker, engraver, illustrator, and printer — roles that, in his hands, were rarely kept separate. His writing was produced in English, and his work in print and image often appeared together, each medium reinforcing the other. Among his notable works, Songs of Innocence and of Experience brought together verse that moved between contrasting states of the human condition, while The Marriage of Heaven and Hell combined prose, poetry, and visual imagery in a single volume. Both remain closely identified with his name.

His output extended further still. Jerusalem stands as one of his larger poetic works, an ambitious text that drew on mythological and spiritual themes. The Ancient of Days, a visual work depicting a monumental figure against a dramatic sky, shows his capacity as a painter and printmaker working at the limits of what the forms could carry. Across all of these pieces, Blake demonstrated that he wasn't content to operate within any single medium or tradition.

He spent the whole of his life in London, and it was there, at Charing Cross, that he died on 12 August 1827 at the age of sixty-nine. The Library of Congress records him simply as "Blake, William, 1757-1827" — a span of dates that brackets one of the more varied careers in British artistic and literary history. His citizenship was British, his language English, and his city, from first to last, was London.