1757-1827 · English poet, painter and engraver, author of Songs of Innocence and of Experience
About William Blake
William Blake (1757-1827) was a London engraver, painter and poet who printed his own illuminated books by a relief-etching method he devised, colouring many copies by hand. Little noticed in his lifetime, he combined a fiercely independent Christian imagination with prophetic books of his own mythology. Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) contain his best-known lyrics.
The Tyger is the most famous lyric in William Blake's Songs of Experience, which he etched, printed and hand-coloured in 1794 and issued together with the earlier Songs of Innocence under the subtitle Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. It is the counterpart of The Lamb in Innocence, where a child asks a lamb who made it and answers that its maker is the gentle Lamb of God.