29 Feb William Blake

William Blake – born in 1757 in London – was an inspiration for songwriters Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison and Van Morrison. The beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s 1970 album, Songs of Innocence and Experience, featured musical settings of poems from Blake’s collection of the same name. Blake died in London in 1827 aged 69. He is buried in Bunhill Fields (just north of the City of London), which is also the resting place of John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe. There’s a bust in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey and a memorial plaque in St James’s Church, Piccadilly.

In addition to Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), Blake is most famous for The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93): a series of deeply personal texts that express his romantic and revolutionary ideas. Both books were written and illuminated by Blake, who was an expert illustrator and printmaker. So too was the epic poem Milton (1804-10) in which John Milton (who was Blake’s hero) returns to Earth and joins Blake on a spiritual journey.