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Blake is one of the major Romantic poets, whose verse and artwork became part of the wider movement of Romanticism in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century European Culture. For the nineteenth century reader Blake's work posed a single question: was he sane or mad? The poet Wordsworth, for example, commented that there "is no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in his madness which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott" and John Ruskin similarly felt that Blake's work was "diseased and wild", even if his mind was "great and wise". In the Twentieth century, however, Blake has been recognized as a highly original and important poet, artist and writer. The famous work of Blake that I chose to analyze is entitled Nebuchadnezzar, created in 1795. Blake's work can be difficult at times, mainly because the reader is offered Blake's visions in Blake's own terms. What Blake seeks to express can only be presented in terms of vague abstractions and allusions, with a cosmic perspective on issues of faith, religion, philosophy and belief, and this must also mean that the reader or viewer has to work hard. Yet the effort is worth it. William Blake was born in 1757, the third son of a London hosier. As the son of a hosier, a generally lower middle class occupation in late eighteenth century London, he was brought up in a poor household, a preparation for the relative poverty in which he would live for most of his life.
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