William Blake

The lines that circulate today — imagination as "the body of God", or as "human existence itself" — come from a man who spent almost his whole life inside one city and sold very little of what he made. Blake was a poet, painter and printmaker, and while he was alive almost nobody recognised what he was doing. The reputation came later.

He was born in London in November 1757 and died there in August 1827. Apart from three years at Felpham, London was where he stayed and where the work was made: a large, varied and heavily symbolic body of poetry and images that has since become central to how the Romantic Age is understood, in both writing and visual art.

The pieces he called his "prophetic works" remain the hardest part of that output to get into. The twentieth-century critic Northrop Frye described them as what is, measured against their merits, the least read poetry in the English language — a judgement that says as much about the demands Blake made on readers as about the readers themselves.

That gap between how little attention he received in his own lifetime and how firmly he sits in the canon now is a large part of why people still quote him.