Biography may be the art form least likely to be practiced by artists. So, in a field of hacks and hagiographers, it is a joy to come upon Peter Ackroyd, the author of strong recent biographies of Dickens and T.S. Eliot, who brings an historian's thoroughness, a critic's fine eye and a novelist's sense of flowing narrative to "Blake," his biography of the poet who seems to have been born to be misunderstood.

What details we have of Blake's life have, of course, been known for years: his boyhood amidst the world of Dissenting London (he was born in 1757); the hallucinatory "visions" he began to relate in childhood (for which he was soundly whipped by his father); his entry into the engraving trade; his sporadic but prodigious artistic output; and his long slow slide into poverty and obscurity. Ackroyd can tell a tale, and manages to cover this old ground so that it feels new. Reading "Blake," you feel vividly connected to the world of 18th century London, a world of coffeehouses and tradesmen who belonged to a seemingly endless list of dissenting sects -- Moravians, Muggletonians, Thraskites, Salmonists, Hutchinsonians, Swedenborgians, and more. Blake's circle argued about the newest interpretation of God the way today's would-be intellectuals discuss current magazines. The poet's hallucinatory faculty suited this environment, so that "What Blake saw was not the crepuscular and dirty city of the historian's imagination, but a city filled with angels and prophets. He saw a biblical city."

Ackroyd manages the most crucial task of a Blake biographer: smoothly connecting the poet and the engraver, showing us that Blake's art is an indivisible mingling of two forms, that "words were for [Blake] objects carved out of metal." You could spend a lifetime trying to fully commune with Blake's work -- Allen Ginsburg and the rest of the Beats certainly have. If, however, you have less time to spare, this well-done book is the place to start.

--Edward Neuert