The work of William BlakeWilliam Blake, a visionary English poet and painter who was a precursor of English Romanticism, combined the vocations of engraver, painter and poet. He was born on 28 November 1757, the son of a London sock. Blake spent all of his relatively quiet life in London, with the exception of a sojourn at Felpham on the south coast of England, from 1800 to 1803. Largely self-taught, Blake was, however, widely read and his poetry shows the influence of the German mystic Jakob. Boehme, for example, and Swedenborgianism. As a child, Blake wanted to be a painter. He was sent to drawing school at the age of 10 and at the age of 14 was apprenticed to James Basire, an engraver. After drawing frequently at Westminster Abbey, he developed an interest in the Gothic style, which he combined with a taste for the art of Raphael, Michelangelo and Durer. He exhibited his first works of art in 1780, married Catherine Boucher in 1782, and published his first poems, Poetical Sketches, in 1783. However he quickly withdrew them from circulation, apparently offended by the condescending preface written by a patron. Among its traditional and derivative elements are hints of his later innovative style and themes. Like all his poetry, this volume reached few contemporary readers. Blake produced and published his other works himself, except those that remained in manuscript at his death, using his unique method of engraving both illustration and text onto copper plates and hand-coloring the printed volumes. . He made numerous engravings for other people's books, as well as watercolors and other types of paintings. Blake only gave... half the paper... as he was not well known when he was alive, but his influence is evident in the work of several painters who knew him in his old age, notably Samuel Palmer. He also influenced the Pre-Raphaelite painters of the 19th century, and his first publisher was WB Yeats, who knew much of his poetry by heart. James Joyce, D.H.Lawrence, and Joyce Cary, among others, found inspiration in his writings, and he had a notable influence on modern literary criticism through the work of Northrop Frye. Today Blake is one of the most discussed poets. Of those who actually knew Blake, Palmer left the most interesting estimate of him: "In him you saw the Creator, the Inventor... He was energy itself and spread around him a burning influence, an atmosphere of life, full of ideas... .. He was a man without a mask."