Poetry and the visual arts have long been co-conspirators -- poets have written many so-called ekphrastic poems based on paintings, and artists have often been called upon to illustrate poems -- but William Blake was that rare thing, a great artist who was as much poet as painter, as much illustrator as writer. He was a visionary who created his own mythology, wrote satires, prophecies, epics and children’s rhymes, and made hand-colored illustrated books that remain admired icons of the two arts centuries after his death.

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