https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/visions-william-blake
“In 1779, Blake began his formal art education at the Royal Academy of Art’s Schools of Design, where he was encouraged to study painters such as Rubens instead of the Renaissance works that his teacher called “stiff and unfinished.” Blake pursued his own artistic goals, and a short time afterward published his first book of poems, Poetical Sketches.
In later works, including Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, the engravings and verses are inextricably intertwined, part of a singular vision where neither word nor image is privileged over the other. He produced them with the help of his wife, using a method called relief engraving (which he is credited for inventing) and hand-coloring each plate. His poetic and artistic work is characterized by a unique commitment to imagination as opposed to reason, and the visionary, almost terrifying, and sometimes grotesque nature of his subject matter.
Drawing on religious themes, and preferring a loose, expressive style, his book Songs of Innocence has the quality of a children’s book, with darker, adult political themes just beneath the surface. Angels are depicted alongside men, women, and children, and in the poem “London” he imagines the city as a dark, unreal realm, illustrated with an old man bent toward a child in a shadowy doorframe. The poem begins:
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.”
How my heart sings 