William Blake was born at 28 Broad Street in Soho, London on 28 November 1757. His father James Blake was a hosier. He and his wife Catherine had 6 children. From an early age William Blake was artistic. When he was 14 William was made apprentice to an engraver called James Basire. William served 7 years and became an engraver himself in 1779. Blake also wanted to paint and the same year he became a student at the Royal Academy of Arts.

On 18 August 1782 William Blake married Catherine Sophia Boucher . Blake also wrote poems. A book of poems called Poetical Sketches was published in 1783. In 1789 he published a book of poems called The Song of Innocence. In 1793 Blake published Visions of the Daughters of Albion and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The Great Poet In 1794 Blake published a book of poems called Songs of Experience. It included the famous poem The Tiger. In 1794 William Blake published Europe, a Prophecy. In 1820 Blake painted The Goblin. He also painted a miniature called The Ghost of a Flea. In 1825 Blake was commissioned illustrate Divine Comedy by Dante but he died before he could complete the task. William Blake died on 12 August 1827 and he was buried in Bunhill Fields in London.
POEM: The Tyger
COMMENT
Blake is building on the conventional idea that nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence.
The tiger initially appears as a strikingly sensuous image. However Blake’s tiger becomes the symbolic center for an investigation into the presence of evil in the world.  The poem addresses not only the question of who could make such a creature as the tiger, but who would perform this act. Note, in the third stanza, the parallelism of “shoulder” and “art,” as well as the fact that it is not just the body but also the “heart” of the tiger that is being forged. 
The reference to the lamb in the penultimate stanza reminds the reader that a tiger and a lamb have been created by the same God, and raises questions about the implications of this. The perspective of experience in this poem involves a sophisticated acknowledgment of what is unexplainable in the universe, presenting evil as the prime example of something that cannot be denied, but will not withstand facile explanation, either.

On August 9, 1922, Philip Larkin was born in Coventry, England. He attended St. John's College, Oxford. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945 and, though not particularly strong on its own, is notable insofar as certain passages foreshadow the unique sensibility and maturity that characterizes his later work.
With his second volume of poetry, The Less Deceived (1955), Larkin became the preeminent poet of his generation, and a leading voice of what came to be called "The Movement," a group of young English writers who rejected the prevailing fashion for Neo-romantic writing in the style of Yeats and Dylan Thomas . Like Hardy, Larkin focused on intense personal emotion but strictly avoided sentimentality or self-pity.
Deeply anti-social and a great lover and published critic of American jazz, Larkin never married and worked as a librarian in the provincial city of Hull, where he died on December 2, 1985.
POEM: Annus Mirabilis
COMMENT
The idea that “sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three” is an exaggeration, and this shocking phrase that starts off the poem is designed to hook the reader.There are references to events which defined the new spirit of the sexual freedom. D.H Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley was a novel that was seen as pornographic and had been banned on grounds of obscenity, while the Beatles were the markers for a  change from conservative Britain to a permissive society. Larkin contrasts previous years, in which sexual intercourse was a source of "shame" that caused "bargaining" between the sexes and could only be achieved by a marriage.