Born to James and Catherine Blake in Soho, London, a bustling center of print shops and artisan trade. His family’s Dissenting Protestant background encouraged private devotion and skepticism toward established authority.

As a child he reported visionary experiences, later describing angels and spiritual scenes in everyday London streets. These claims alarmed some relatives but became a lifelong source for his symbolic language and imagery.

Blake began a seven-year apprenticeship with James Basire, learning meticulous engraving and print preparation. The discipline of line, reversed images, and plate work later enabled his experimental “illuminated” books.

Basire sent him to draw tombs and monuments in Westminster Abbey, immersing him in medieval art and funerary sculpture. The Abbey’s Gothic forms and sacred atmosphere shaped his taste for dramatic, visionary design.

He studied at the Royal Academy, where Joshua Reynolds promoted “general” ideal forms and classical restraint. Blake resisted Reynolds’s theory, preferring precise outline, intense expression, and spiritual immediacy in art.

Blake married Catherine Boucher, who became his essential partner, learning to read, write, and assist with printing and coloring. Their collaboration sustained his demanding craft and unconventional publishing ambitions for decades.

With support from friends like John Flaxman and the Rev. Henry Mathew, Blake published "Poetical Sketches". The volume showed early lyrical power and theatrical influence, signaling a distinctive voice within emerging Romantic culture.

After James Blake died, William and Catherine set up a small shop to support themselves through engraving and design work. Financial pressure pushed him toward self-publication, where he could control text, image, and coloring.

Blake’s beloved brother Robert died, an event he treated as spiritually charged and artistically decisive. He later claimed Robert revealed technical guidance in a vision, reinforcing his drive to merge poetry and image through print.

He issued "Songs of Innocence" using his newly developed relief-etching approach, integrating handwritten text with designs on copper plates. The work offered a pastoral spiritual clarity, printed and hand-colored in small, intimate editions.

Relocating to Lambeth placed him near radical political circles as Britain debated the French Revolution’s meaning. In this period he wrote and designed ambitious mythic works, forging figures like Urizen and Los to critique tyranny.

Blake printed "America: a Prophecy" and polemical pieces such as "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" and "Visions of the Daughters of Albion". He attacked moral repression and political oppression, echoing the era’s contentious reform debates.

He paired earlier poems with darker companion pieces, creating "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" as a single, shifting whole. The famous contrast of "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" framed innocence, trauma, and social injustice together.

Blake and Catherine relocated to the coastal village of Felpham after accepting patronage from writer William Hayley. The arrangement promised stability but constrained Blake’s independence, intensifying his frustration with commissioned, conventional work.

After a dispute with private John Schofield, Blake was accused of seditious words against the King during wartime political paranoia. He was tried at Chichester and acquitted, but the episode deepened his sense of persecution and resolve.

Back in London, he poured years into "Milton" and "Jerusalem," expansive illuminated epics with dense symbolism and national myth. These works recast England as “Albion,” seeking spiritual liberation through imagination and artistic prophecy.

Blake staged an exhibition above his brother’s shop, hoping to win recognition as a painter and visionary designer. A notorious review by Robert Hunt in "The Examiner" mocked his art, worsening his isolation despite the show’s ambition.

Artist John Linnell befriended Blake, offering commissions and introducing him to younger admirers who valued his originality. This support improved his finances and morale, helping him sustain late projects that demanded intense labor and skill.

In his final years he produced powerful watercolor designs for Dante’s "Divine Comedy" under Linnell’s commission. Though left unfinished, the series shows bold draftsmanship and spiritual drama, linking medieval vision to Romantic imagination.

Blake died in 1827 after continuing to draw and speak of spiritual realities with calm conviction. Catherine Blake and friends such as John Linnell preserved his prints and manuscripts, enabling later generations to recognize his genius.