Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A biography of William Blake. Poet, painter, engraver, visionary, his was a radical spirit fired by genius. The book presents Blake in the context of his period: we see him caught up in the Gordon Riots, excited by the French Revolution and attracted by various forms of spiritual radicalism and sexual magic. Peter Ackroyd has also written Dickens, a biography of Charles Dickens.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In his latest work, noted novelist and biographer Ackroyd (The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, LJ 5/1/95) writes on the life and influences of 18th-century poet and engraver William Blake. His biography explores in extensive detail the motivations behind Blake's captivating works. Born into a home built upon a cemetery, in a neighborhood containing an orphanage, an overcrowded hospital, and a workhouse for women, Blake emerged a sensitive, nervous child who saw visions of angels. Like someone who is alone in a crowded room, Blake isolated himself from his family and surrounded himself with peers who shared his love of antiquity. Blake's life was ruled by contrary images‘heaven and hell, agelessness and mortality‘and he was even able to write both backward and forward fluently, a skill needed for an engraver. Complemented by an impressive number of illustrations of Blake's engravings and family and friends, this painstakingly researched biography is a sensitive portrayal of a complicated and talented man. Highly recommended. [BOMC selection.]‘Jaqueline Garlesky, Univ. of Pittsburgh, Johnstown, Pa. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

The British novelist's account of the life of the visionary poet and painter. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Ackroyd, novelist and biographer (e.g., Dickens, CH, Jul'91), has produced a rich account of William Blake's life and times in London, 1757-1827. The author's descriptive skills are evident in his depictions of the high and low in London life. He is plausible, too, on Blake's difficult personality, and on his relationships with such associates and patrons as William Hayley, John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard, and Thomas Butts. Blake's wife, Catherine, also receives appropriate attention. Ackroyd's Blake seems a real man in a real society, but he was extraordinary too--a visionary poet and artist. Ackroyd takes Blake's visions very seriously, finding remarkable "the extent to which an ordinary childhood capacity [for visions] was maintained by [Blake] until the end of his life." Like James King's William Blake: His Life, (CH, Oct'91), Ackroyd's book uses current sources, though Ackroyd's study is longer and thereby more detailed. King attempts more literary interpretation; Ackroyd is distinctly better on the art. King will do for one with passing interest in Blake, but Ackroyd's readable volume is appropriate for both the casual and the serious student. All collections. J. D. McGowan; Illinois Wesleyan University

Booklist Review

William Blake, one of the eighteenth century's most cryptic poets and prophetic artists, is re-examined and re-envisioned by Ackroyd in this both intelligently researched and highly sensitive biography. Ackroyd goes beyond the facts of a great life to situating Blake in his world--middle-class London amidst a radical and mystical religious and philosophical climate. Ackroyd takes surprising care in exploring Blake's childhood, education, training as an artist, marriage, and interior spiritual terrain. Moreover, he offers adept insights into Blake's influences and work, art and poetry (which he rightly shows as inherently linked). Blake's life comes to the reader, formed by stages, grounded by detail, yet colored with soft tints of otherworldly visions and revelations. Ackroyd has managed to merge the engaging details of Blake's surroundings and his interior life into an unusually comprehensible and believable portrait of a tremendously gifted and frequently misunderstood poet, artist, and visionary. Ackroyd's biography, which will be lavishly enhanced by pages of black-and-white and color illustrations in sections and throughout the text, may very well renew interest in Blake, and that alone is no small feat. --Janet St. John

Kirkus Book Review

Ackroyd's biography of William Blake represents an achievement of composite method fully in the poet's own spirit--it's a work so sensitive to its subject, it seems to have conjured him from the beyond. Scholar, workaday artisan, mystic, and social critic, Blake (1757-1827) excelled at poetry, engraving, and painting. Yet rather than spread his multifacteed genius through diverse pursuits, Blake concentrated it into his homemade books--famous now, but noted in his day only as oddities. For these sui generis productions, Blake printed pages where script and illustration flow side by side: now commenting on this world, now offering visions of others. Novelist and biographer Ackroyd (The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, 1995; Dickens, 1991; etc.) again shows himself to be an adept literary critic and historian: His explications of many of Blake's works, from widely known lyrics like ""The Tyger"" to hermetic epics like ""The Four Zoas,"" unfold into detailed panoramas of England as Blake knew it. He captures the difficulties that the radical Blake faced in squaring his art training at the prestigious Royal Academy with his humble artisanal background. The blunt, ""gothic,"" outline forms of Raphael and D(infinity)rer, out of fashion at the time, provided Blake with an alternative tradition with which to affiliate himself; such contemporaries as John Flaxman and Henry Fuseli provided moral support. Above all, Ackroyd stresses Blake's intimate relation to his London environs and to the crises of war and industrialization that beset Britain during his life. While he argues that Blake was often caught up in hallucinatory waking visions, Ackroyd weighs against any diagnosis of mental illness the justice of Blake's claim that he was gifted to see through and beyond the insane upheavals of his times. Not the least part of Ackroyd's accomplishment is to have limited himself to 416 pages--enough, and (to paraphrase Blake), assuredly not too much. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Peter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. He graduated from Cambridge University and was a Fellow at Yale (1971-1973). A critically acclaimed and versatile writer, Ackroyd began his career while at Yale, publishing two volumes of poetry. He continued writing poetry until he began delving into historical fiction with The Great Fire of London (1982).

A constant theme in Ackroyd's work is the blending of past, present, and future, often paralleling the two in his biographies and novels. Much of Ackroyd's work explores the lives of celebrated authors such as Dickens, Milton, Eliot, Blake, and More. Ackroyd's approach is unusual, injecting imagined material into traditional biographies. In The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), his work takes on an autobiographical form in his account of Wilde's final years. He was widely praised for his believable imitation of Wilde's style. He was awarded the British Whitbread Award for biography in 1984 of T.S. Eliot, and the Whitbread Award for fiction in 1985 for his novel Hawksmoor.

Ackroyd currently lives in London and publishes one or two books a year. He still considers poetry to be his first love, seeing his novels as an extension of earlier poetic work.

(Bowker Author Biography)