How Did William Blake's Influence His Work?

William Blake, Poet, artist, and engraver was born in London on November 28, 1757, to James Blake, a hosiery merchant, and Catherine Hermitage, whose first husband had left to her a similar business. Blake was raised in his parents’ home, above their business at Broad and Marshall Streets, an area where many merchants and tradesmen did business. Not much is known about the faith of his parents; they were Christian—they were married in one Anglican church and baptized most or all of their children in another—but they did not always quite follow the Anglican or the Catholic Church. Both Catherine and John Blake, held radical political views, and the influence of this radicalism were manifesting itself throughout Blake’s work. Blake’s personal

In the next five years, he gained a background in art history and many skills. On his own, he was a great reader, reading avidly the Bible, Greek classics, and the works of Milton and Shakespeare. He was writing as early as 1767 or 1768, when he began, what would become his Poetical Sketches. Blake’s schooling in art finally became too costly for his parents to support, and in 1771 he was apprenticed to engraver James Basire of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, whose assignments to sketch Westminster Abbey, may mark the first stirrings of Blake’s later Gothic tendencies. The first engraving made by William Blake was “Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion”, in 1773, and “The Body of Edward I in His Coffin” was made in 1974. After his apprenticeship ended, he did not join the Stationers’ Guild, which was the usual path to professional engraving; but he applied to the Royal Academy of Arts, where he was accepted, in 1779, as an engraver. He studied and exhibited his engravings, and water colors there for several years, though he disliked head of the