More than 150 years after his death, William Blake (1757–1827) remains a cryptic and controversial figure. Equally gifted as a poet and a painter, he produced work that is as arresting for its beauty as for its strangeness. With this fresh examination of Blake’s unfolding career, William Vaughan presents an artist with a radical and utterly individual vision, who was deeply concerned with the social, religious, and political issues of his age.