William Blake's wish to be read as a philosopher in his early works is expressed in numerous ways. His main enemies were not other poets or visual artists but the natural philosophers Emanuel Swedenborg, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke. In his earliest manuscript, An Island in the Moon (c.1784–85), Blake self-identifies as Quid the Cynic, and much of the work satirizes philosophical positions; similarly, Blake's first illuminated works are not poetry but the philosophical tractates There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One (1788), which attack Lockean empiricism and Newtonian deism. And on the title page of his 1788 edition of John Caspar Lavater's Aphorisms on Man, Blake drew a heart around his own name and that of the philosopher, and further linked himself to Lavater within the book, writing, “we who are philosophers ought not to call the Staminal Virtues of Humanity by the same name that we call the omissions of intellect springing from poverty.” Blake took it for granted that he would be recognized as a philosopher, and his poetry and designs reveal a consistent preoccupation with questions pertinent to eighteenth-century natural philosophy, which, preceding the “sciences” as we currently designate them, concerned the study of nature and the physical universe.

Today, Blake is first recognized as a poet, but poetry was for him a way of philosophizing, as it was for other Romantic writers. In his Defence of Poetry, Shelley declared that the difference between prose and poetry was misleading, and that Plato and Francis Bacon were essentially poets. Drawing from William Wordsworth's preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Shelley proclaimed the synthesizing powers of the imagination as fundamental to moral virtue, and he wrote that poetry is an epistemological tool that yields as much, if not more, insight into human experience as science, philosophy and religion.