William Blake is one of the very few great poets to have devoted himself to art and to writing with equal commitment. Apprenticed for seven years to an engraver, he made his living in that trade all his life. He also studied in the Royal Academy schools; he painted in water colour and in tempera, made ‘colour printed drawings’, and devised a mode of relief etching in order to incorporate text and image into what we now call his illuminated books. This discussion must necessarily be limited to his poetry, but we should remember that Blake conceived most of his poems in conjunction with designs.

Blake’s first book, however, was printed, though never published. Produced in 1783 at the expense of friends, Poetical Sketches was presumably circulated among the members of a small circle, and some copies were kept by Blake himself. The book was not seen by a wider readership until Richard Herne Shepherd’s edition of 1868. An anonymous ‘Advertisement’ told the reader that the poems were ‘the production of an untutored youth, commenced by the author in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year’ (E 846). As his time since then had been occupied with ‘the attainment of excellence in his profession’, he had not had ‘the leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets, as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye’.