William Blake

William Blake (1757–1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker, and one of the most original visionary minds of the Romantic age. Born in London, he trained as an engraver and worked for most of his life in relative obscurity and poverty, developing a unique “illuminated printing” method that fused his poetry and images on the same etched plate.

From childhood he reported visions, and he built from them an idiosyncratic mythology spanning works such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789–1794), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790), and the long prophetic books Milton and Jerusalem.

He drew on the Bible, on the mystic Jacob Boehme, and on Emanuel Swedenborg—whom he read intently before turning critical—to construct a thoroughgoing spiritual idealism.

At the center of Blake’s thought stands the Imagination, which he identified with the divine and with ultimate reality itself. In Jerusalem he calls Imagination “the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow,” reversing the ordinary assumption that the material world is primary.

For Blake the senses and reason (“the ratio”) give only a diminished view; true perception is imaginative and visionary, and the human imagination is continuous with God (“the Divine Body”). This conviction—that the inner, imaginative act is more real than outward matter and is the creative source of experience—makes Blake a foundational source for the later mind-power and manifestation traditions, and a direct, repeatedly acknowledged influence on Neville Goddard, who opened Awakened Imagination (1954) with Blake’s words and called it the truest definition of imagination he knew.