Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine.

I'm Ellie Cawthorne.

After sitting next to the poet and painter William Blake at a dinner party one evening,

Henry Crabb Robinson wondered in his diary, whether Blake was, quote, artist or genius genius or mystic or madman well today i'll be trying to untangle those contradictions with john Higgs who's the author of william blake versus the world

a new biography that reveals how an eccentric man now hailed in the pantheon of British art was ignored and

mocked during his lifetime and how Blake's work is still misunderstood today. Thanks very much for

joining me, John. So your new book is all about William Blake. I think if you say to most listeners

in the UK, William Blake, they'll know the words for him, Jerusalem.

We've got green and pleasant land, dark satanic mills, which come from a Blake poem.

They might also know Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright. And maybe some people will know that Blake

was also a painter as well as a poet. But what do we really need to remember about him other than that?

Well, I think he was unique, basically.

I don't think we've ever had anyone quite like him to be so talented on so many levels.

You know, we don't have national poets who are also regarded as brilliant, brilliant artists

who have their own, you know own massive retrospectives at Take Britain.

And we don't understand him.

That's the interesting thing.

He's just, he saw the world in a way that is so different to how we see it,

that there's something about his work that is incredibly attractive and appealing,

that we all feel drawn to it, yet we're slightly scared of at the same time.

A lot of people, they, oh yeah, I like Blake, I love Blake, but they don't read him.

They don't sort of go into him.

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