William Blake 
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell William Blake – The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a book by the English poet and printmaker William Blake. It is a series of texts written in imitation of biblical prophecy but expressing Blake’s own intensely personal Romantic and revolutionary beliefs. Like his other books, it was published as printed sheets from etched plates containing prose, poetry and illustrations. The plates were then coloured by Blake and his wife Catherine.Once regarded as a brilliant eccentric whose works skirted the outer fringes of English art and literature, William Blake (17571827) is today recognized as a major poet, a profound thinker, and one of the most original and exciting English artists. Nowhere is his glorious poetic and pictorial legacy more evident than in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which many consider his most inspired and original work.The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is both a humorous satire on religion and morality and a work that concisely expresses Blake’s essential wisdom and philosophy, much of it revealed in the 70 aphorisms of his ‘Proverbs of Hell.’

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William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake’s work is today considered seminal and significant in the history of both poetry and the visual arts.Blake’s prophetic poetry has been said to form ‘what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the language’. His visual artistry has led one modern critic to proclaim him ‘far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced.’ Although he only once travelled any further than a day’s walk outside London over the course of his life, his creative vision engendered a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced ‘imagination’ as ‘the body of God’, or ‘Human existence itself’.Once considered mad for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is highly regarded today for his expressiveness and creativity, and the philosophical and mystical currents that underlie his work. His work has been characterized as part of the Romantic movement, or even ‘Pre-Romantic’, for its largely having appeared in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the established Church, Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Emanuel Swedenborg.Despite these known influences, the originality and singularity of Blake’s work make it difficult to classify. One 19th century scholar characterised Blake as a ‘glorious luminary’, ‘a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors.’