Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. All around him, Blake saw tendencies to attempt to restrict human capacity and the freedom of the imagination, all of which strengthened his commitment to man`s basic right to social, political, religious and sexual equality. Along with the Romantic poets, Blake sought out a spiritual truth, a truth that could only be achieved by the use of feelings and the imagination. He believed that man originated from a spiritual realm, and was born as a free spirit, but that as a result of the deeply negative influence from the earth itself, man became trapped in the confines of his physical body and the five senses, which limited his capacity for perception. The only way to be freed from this confinement was by what he called "Imagination," the capacity to apprehend realities beyond the prison of the physical world.
When considering the totality of Blake`s work, it has been suggested that he worked on two levels; a commercial or worldly level, and a spiritual level. On the one hand he worked as a commercial engraver, undertaking engraving and printing jobs for his customers. On the other hand he produced his personal, spiritual work, and it was this part of Blake`s work that inspired his development of illuminated printing and prophetic books, written "so that the spirits could see them." The poems in Blake`s Prophetic Books were exciting texts of a mystical nature, and very few people could understand them, not even Blake`s closest friends. Today they are considered to be masterpieces, expressing Blake`s belief in a spiritual world and his hope that man can overcome all limitations by means of the spirit within himself.
Blake was above all a great religious thinker who used both art and words to express mental and spiritual truths that had been forgotten by an increasingly materialistic society. Blake`s great achievement was to uphold the image of the spiritual man in a world dominated by material forces. This he was able to do because he felt himself part of a vast spiritual world, a world that had been revealed to him in his visions. Some regarded him as not clearly in his right mind, but others were convinced that what he saw was true. It is a question of what kind of world you believed in. And to Blake, reality was spirituality.