In 1685 he married Mary Adams, whose family connections aided him in winning a place in the Royal College of Physicians in 1687.

He had trouble with the College, being censured for taking leave without permission, and he strongly opposed the project for setting up a free dispensary for the poor in London.

The poem was based on the form of Virgil's The Aeneid and the subject matter of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae.

Nevertheless, it went through three editions and William made Blackmore physician-in-ordinary (a position he would hold with Queen Anne as well), gave him a gold medal, and knighted him in 1697.

Additionally, Blackmore took John Milton as his model, rather than Virgil, and he admitted in his preface that his previous book had been too adherent to the Classical unities.

Having used his epics to fight political battles, albeit safe ones at first, Blackmore was opposed by wits of the other camp, especially as time went on.

Once more, the "epic" was current events, as it meant to denounce John Radcliffe, a Jacobite physician who was out of favor with Anne.

Two occasional pieces followed: An advice to the poets: a poem occasioned by the wonderful success of her majesty's arms, under the conduct of the duke of Marlborough in Flanders (1706) and Instructions to Vander Beck (1709).

This was a tune up for Creation: A Philosophical Poem in 1712, which was praised by John Dennis, Joseph Addison, and, later, Samuel Johnson, for its Miltonic tone.

Johnson thought that it would be the sole memory of Blackmore, and Dennis said that it was the English De Rerum Natura, but with infinitely better reasoning.

In 1722 he continued his religious themes with Redemption, an epic on the divinity of Jesus Christ designed to oppose and confute the Arians (as he called the Unitarians).

It was dedicated to Prince Frederick, the eldest son of King George II, but the poem vanished without causing any comment from court or town.

In 1724, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was set to publish Blackmore's Psalms as official for America, but the Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson (a conservative, but a Whig), opposed the project and kept it from coming to fruition.

Blackmore has come down, largely through the verse of Alexander Pope, as one avatar of Dulness, but, as a physician, he was quite forward thinking.

He agreed with Sir Thomas Sydenham that observation and the physician's experience should take precedence over any Aristotelian ideals or hypothetical laws.