William Blake

G. K. Chesterton's portrait of William Blake reveals an artist too singular for ordinary biography: a poet-prophet whose visions, symbols, and spiritual drama seem to precede experience itself. He traces Blake from his London childhood in a respectable shopkeeping household to the sudden tenderness of his marriage to Catherine Boucher, emphasizing the frail body, square-headed intensity, and calm acceptance of visions that made him seem set apart from the start. Chesterton celebrates Blake's fierce devotion to line, clarity, and exact form as an engraver and illustrator, contrasting his discipline with the blurred, atmospheric art he despised. He attacks the taste of Rubens and the art establishment with prophetic wit, while honoring Raphael, Flaxman, and the hard beauty of carved outline. Through works such as The Gates of Paradise, The Book of Job, and Blair's The Grave, Blake emerges as a creator who could be wildly wrong or astonishingly right, but never vague. At once generous and impatient, radical and deeply loyal to London, Blake is shown as a brilliant mind whose genius, eccentricity, and obsessive repetitions are inseparable. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.