William Blake Trivia
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108 free William Blake trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This William Blake trivia quiz covers the poet, painter and printmaker who was largely ignored in his lifetime and is now a fixture of every English literature course. It begins with the boy in Soho who saw angels in a tree on Peckham Rye, follows him through his engraving apprenticeship, the Royal Academy and the Gordon Riots, and into the illuminated books he printed by hand with his wife Catherine: Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Milton and the prophetic books. There are questions on the poems everyone half-remembers (The Tyger, London, The Lamb), on the hymn 'Jerusalem' and its long afterlife with suffragists, the Women's Institute and the Proms, on the paintings (Newton, The Ancient of Days, The Ghost of a Flea) and on the odder corners of the story: the sedition trial in Chichester, the Visionary Heads, the archangels he said read his work, and the grave that went unmarked until 2018. About a third are easy; the rest are for people who know their Zoas. See also our Romantic poets and English literature quizzes. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Blake, his poems, paintings and circle, and each explanation adds one more detail.
30 of 108 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which London district was William Blake born in 1757?
Soho
Soho stayed part of his story: Blake was born above the family shop in Broad Street, and in 1809 he staged his own exhibition in his brother's shop on the same street.
Q 02What was the trade of Blake's father, James?
Hosier
Hosier James Blake kept a moderately prosperous shop in Broad Street and backed his son's talent, buying him prints and plaster casts to draw from.
Q 03Blake engraved plates for the 1791 edition of Original Stories from Real Life, a children's book by which writer?
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft and Blake shared a publisher, the radical bookseller Joseph Johnson, who often gave Blake illustrating work and had him design the plates for her book.
Q 04As a boy on Peckham Rye, Blake claimed to have seen a tree filled with what?
Angels
Blake said he saw a tree on Peckham Rye filled with angels, bright wings bespangling every bough; his father nearly thrashed him for lying until his mother intervened.
Q 05As a child, Blake said he saw which Old Testament prophet under a tree in the fields?
Ezekiel
Ezekiel under a tree in the fields was one of Blake's childhood visions; at four, by a friend's account, he had seen God put his head to the window.
Q 06To which engraver was Blake apprenticed for seven years from 1772?
James Basire
James Basire got the boy after a first choice fell through: Blake reportedly refused William Ryland, saying he looked as if he would live to be hanged, and Ryland was, for forgery, in 1783.
Q 07Sketching the monuments of which building during his apprenticeship shaped Blake's Gothic style?
Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey is where his master sent the teenage Blake to draw the royal tombs for an antiquary's book, reportedly to keep him clear of quarrels among the other apprentices.
Q 08As a young man, Blake was swept along by a mob that stormed Newgate Prison during which upheaval?
The Gordon Riots
The Gordon Riots of June 1780, anti-Catholic riots provoked by the Papists Act of 1778, burned Newgate Prison and freed its prisoners; Blake was reportedly carried along at the front of the crowd.
Q 09Which institution's founding president, Joshua Reynolds, did the student Blake rebel against in 1779?
The Royal Academy
Blake entered the Royal Academy schools in October 1779 and despised its first president Joshua Reynolds, yet exhibited there himself, first in 1780 with The Death of Earl Goodwin.
Q 10In which church did Blake marry Catherine Boucher in August 1782?
St Mary's, Battersea
St Mary's, Battersea, was the bride's family church; Blake had met her in the village a year earlier while smarting from a rejected courtship, and reportedly won her by asking 'Do you pity me?'
Q 11How did Catherine Boucher sign the register at her 1782 wedding to Blake?
With an X
With an X: she could not yet write her name, so Blake taught her to read and write, and she went on to help him print and colour his illuminated books.
Q 12What was Blake's first book of poems, printed in 1783 after his drawing-room recitals won him patrons?
Poetical Sketches
Poetical Sketches gathered verse he had written from the age of twelve; after he sang his poems at Mrs Mathew's gatherings, her husband and the sculptor John Flaxman shared the cost of printing.
Q 13What printing method did Blake invent in 1788 to put his poems and pictures on one plate?
Relief etching
Q 21In Blake's mythology, which bearded figure embodies conventional reason and law?
Urizen
Urizen is Blake's bearded lawgiver; in America the rebel Orc accuses him of perverting 'fiery joy' into the Ten Commandments and vows to stamp that 'stony law' to dust.
Q 22Blake's design The Ancient of Days first appeared as the frontispiece to which 1794 work?
Europe a Prophecy
Europe a Prophecy opens with the image, a favourite Blake kept copying: he coloured one last impression in 1827, shortly before he died, and reportedly declared, 'There, that will do! I cannot mend it.'
Q 23Blake's 1795 print Newton shows the scientist drawing on a scroll with which instrument?
A compass
Relief etching came to him, Blake said, in a vision: his dead brother Robert appeared and showed him how to draw poem and picture on copper in acid-proof varnish, then etch the rest away.
Q 14Which title did Blake use in both Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience?
Holy Thursday
Holy Thursday comes twice: in Innocence the charity children file into church with 'innocent faces clean', while the Experience poem asks how such poverty can exist in a rich and fruitful land.
Q 15Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) is subtitled 'Shewing the Two Contrary States' of what?
The Human Soul
The Human Soul: Blake first issued Songs of Innocence on its own in 1789, and only five years later joined it to the darker Songs of Experience under this shared title.
Q 16'The Tyger' was written as the counterpart to which poem from Songs of Innocence?
The Lamb
The Lamb asks 'Little Lamb, who made thee?' and answers at once; The Tyger puts the same question to a predator, 'Did he who made the Lamb make thee?', and leaves it hanging.
Q 17What metre is 'The Tyger' largely written in?
Trochaic tetrameter
Trochaic tetrameter, four falling beats as in 'Tyger Tyger, burning bright', drives most of the poem, though a few lines, such as 'Could frame thy fearful symmetry?', slip into a rising iambic beat.
Q 18Blake's title The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is an ironic reference to a book by which theologian?
Emanuel Swedenborg
Emanuel Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell (1758) supplied the title; Blake's Marriage, begun about 1790, attacks him directly, declaring that Swedenborg 'has not written one new truth'.
Q 19In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake's aphorisms in praise of energy and desire go under what title?
Proverbs of Hell
The Proverbs of Hell include 'The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom'; Blake's Hell is no place of punishment but unrepressed energy itself, so its sayings cheer what the pious forbid.
Q 20Aldous Huxley took the title of which book from a line in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell?
The Doors of Perception
The Doors of Perception (1954) records what Huxley saw on mescaline in May 1953; its title is Blake's line 'If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite'.
A compass, a smaller version of the one his creator-god wields in The Ancient of Days: Blake meant the print as a rebuke to a mind that sees only what it can measure.
Q 24Blake's Newton belongs to a set of twelve large colour prints that also shows which Babylonian king?
Nebuchadnezzar
Nebuchadnezzar crawls naked on all fours with claw-like nails: he is the proud king of the Book of Daniel who lost his mind and was driven out to eat grass like an ox.
Q 25Eduardo Paolozzi's giant bronze Newton, modelled on Blake's print, sits outside which London institution?
The British Library
The British Library has had the bronze in its piazza since 1995; Blake drew Newton to attack his narrow science, yet the figure now sits at a national library's door.
Q 26In which Sussex village did Blake spend his only three years outside London?
Felpham
Felpham delighted him at first: he wrote that 'Heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates', but he came to resent his patron's commissions and went back to London.
Q 27In 1800 Blake moved to a Sussex cottage to work for which poet, his new patron?
William Hayley
William Hayley found him work and patrons, and Blake wrote that he 'acts like a Prince'; later, in his notebook, he begged the same man in rhyme, 'Do be my enemy for friendship's sake!'
Q 28A soldier's claim that Blake shouted what led to his 1804 trial for sedition?
Damn the king
'Damn the King' headed the words the soldier John Schofield swore to after Blake marched him out of his garden in August 1803; a Chichester jury acquitted Blake in January 1804, to uproar in court.
Q 29Despite the hymn's popular title, 'And did those feet in ancient time' comes from the preface to which Blake book?
Milton
Milton grew out of a vision at his Sussex cottage in which, Blake said, the dead poet's spirit fell like a star and entered him; the lyric sits in its preface, not in his other long poem, Jerusalem.
Q 30Who set 'And did those feet in ancient time' to music in 1916?
Hubert Parry
Hubert Parry wrote the tune for a 1916 Fight for Right rally at Queen's Hall, then handed the manuscript to the conductor Walford Davies with the words 'do what you like with it'.