William Blake: Some Pieces from the Puzzle

One late winter morning during my freshman year of college, I am idly leafing through an anthology of eighteenth-century British literature while the teaching assistant instructs his captive audience about formal gardens. I start reading these proverbs by a man named William Blake. I am puzzled. What is he doing in this anthology? Does my teaching assistant know that this Blake guy is in the anthology? What is going on? Is this man a spiritual gangster of love?