Personally, I think Blake is dreadful, with a few small exceptions.

Blake had an inflated sense of self-importance - but you can't ignore "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" as an influential work. . .

I don't care much for lunatic mytico-religious poets. With one exception: William Blake's poetic talent was so great, he could make even his most crazed hallucinatory acid-trip Jesus-freak visions into really great poetry: "Cruelty has a human heart/and jealousy a human face/Terror the human form divine!/and secrecy the human dress...."-Blake, 'A Divine Image'

Blake may be one of,if not THE,best Poets who wrote about matters Divine.His visionary style and keen insight have enlightened readers for hundreds of years.

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William Blake was a powerful writer of his time, and his poetry continues on into our modern world. His ideas and views of life continue to be relevant in our technological world. THe ideas he brings forth about the freedom of humans from the industrial world and the crushing governments can have much impact on his readers today. We haven't much changed from the 1700's, and we are still not set free from these things. IT's almost as if these things have set a tighter grip on ourselves.

Blake was perhaps the most eccentric of the Romantic poets. He didn't so much write poetry as interpret exceedingly vivid visions and fit them neatly into rhyming couplets. Poems like Nurses' Song and The Echoing Green made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, poems like London and The Schoolboy mad me feel coldly reflective of the rigid boundaries instated in human society, poems like Little Girl Lost left me scratching my head in bafflement. Quite an interesting poet, if one is tolerant of a little oddness.

The Poison Tree out of Songs Of Experience is one of those rare poems that is an exact example of what poetry should be like. Blake himself is also a rarity. As is displayed by the two different "Songs" books (Innocence and Experience): give him a subject, he can write a poem about it.

Other than "Tyger, Tyger", I don't know much of Blake's poetry, am more familiar with fragments and phrases. But those phrases and fragments are memorable

A true original,an eccentric genius,a mystic visionary (quite literally;he had visions of angels and other forms of divine inpiration),who had a deepfelt concern for the poor and the suffering masses shackled by the industrial revolution,and for the welfare of animals.His works he descibed as "prophetic books"and, failing to get a publisher,created his own extraordinary illustrations that are now considered artistic masterpieces in their own right."Jerusalem" and The Tyger are his most famous poems,but look closely at some of his other smaller or apparently simple work- The Sick Rose("O rose,thou art sick!/The invisible worm/That flies in the night,/In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed of crimson joy/And his dark secret love/Does thy life destroy"),The Chapel of Love,Eternity..- and its unique thinking and imagery will come blazing through.