Hyperlink to William Blake biography.
As a child, Blake viewed the world in the light of what Wordsworth, in his Ode: Intimations of Immortality, would later call a “visionary gleam.” When he was about nine, he told his parents he had seen “a tree filled with angels” on one of his walks; he later reported a similar vision of “angelic figures walking” in a field among workers as they gathered in the hay (Gilchrist 1: 7). Unlike the child in Wordsworth’s poem, however, Blake never outgrew these visions. He was past fifty when he described seeing the rising sun as “an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty” (Erdman 566).
Portrait of Blake, engraved by Schiavonetti after Phillips, 1808. (image/hyperlink)
