William Blake lived seventy years (1757-1827) mostly in poverty and obscurity, although for a stretch of that time he was in full creative vigour. His impact on his contemporaries was wholly incommensurate with his genius; yet ever since his death his originality of mind, both as a poet and as a painter, has bee recognized. Few of the National Collections are without their fine examples of his pictures, while his better-known poems are now part of the current coin of English literature. The exploration of his genius, as Miss Raine shows in this essay, is still continuing. In her view Blake 'is a figure whose stature overtops all but the greatest of men of genius that England - or for that matter, the western world - has known.