Which British Romantic painter was also a poet and illustrated his own books?

The British Romantic painter who was also a poet and illustrated his own books was William Blake. Born in London in 1757, Blake worked across poetry, painting, drawing, and printmaking rather than treating them as separate careers.

Blake developed a distinctive process called relief etching, or illuminated printing. He wrote poems and designed images directly on copper plates, printed the pages himself, and often hand-coloured them in watercolour. This allowed text and illustration to function as a single artistic work. His illuminated books include *Songs of Innocence*, *Songs of Experience*, *The Marriage of Heaven and Hell*, and *Jerusalem*.

He also illustrated works by other writers, including Mary Wollstonecraft’s *Original Stories from Real Life*, John Milton’s *Paradise Lost*, and Dante’s *Divine Comedy*. His imagery was often symbolic, visionary, and deliberately resistant to conventional academic ideas about art.

Blake was relatively unrecognized during his lifetime, but later became a central figure in Romantic literature and visual culture. The distractors are notable artists, yet none combines Blake’s particular identity as poet, painter, printmaker, and maker of self-illustrated books.