A man looks out his childhood window in eighteenth-century London and claims to see the face of the creator of the universe; he walks into the countryside and reports angels glittering in an oak tree. He maintained that perspective for his entire life, died in poverty and obscurity with his masterpiece having sold barely a couple of dozen copies, and is today a titan of modern psychology, rock music, and the counterculture. This deep dive unpacks the life, mind, and radical rebellion of William Blake.

The episode follows Blake from a dissenting religious household and an explosive temper that made schooling impossible, through an engraver’s apprenticeship spent sketching tombs alone in Westminster Abbey, to his clashes with Joshua Reynolds at the Royal Academy and his presence at the Gordon Riots. It examines his marriage to Catherine Boucher, who signed the register with an X and became his colorist and printing partner, the invention of relief etching in 1788, the radical circles of the 1790s, the treason trial that followed a garden scuffle with a soldier in 1803, his private mythology and the figure of Urizen, his failed solo exhibition, the young artists called the Ancients who rediscovered him, and his final days illustrating Dante while singing hymns.

• How solitary years sketching Gothic monuments wired Blake’s brain and gave him a philosophy of authentic, living form
• Why relief etching was a philosophical rejection of the industrial division of labor, not just a technical workaround
• The sedition trial that transformed his view of the state into a demonic agent of mental imprisonment
• His war against the Enlightenment’s clockwork universe and the belief that imagination is the divine essence of reality
• How he visually argued with Dante’s theology and why his death in a cramped room felt, by his own metrics, victorious