Robert Bertholf and Annette Levitt have assembled thirteen essays that establish Blake as a "central voice molding modern literature and thought." The essays in this volume examine Blake's influence on modern poetry, the modern novel, and modern thought from various critical approaches. This collection maps out the lines of direct literary influences and indirect intellectual affinities that make up the tradition of enacted form. Through the use of various aspects of Blake's form and ideas, this book reasserts the idea of continuity, the drive for wholeness, and the arrival of new poetic forms. Blake is considered one of the major and most modern of Romantics. This collection positions him as a precursor of the modern, using his vision and poetry as a base for discussing a central issue in literary theory today—influence and the literary tradition—just how is the legacy of a literary artist passed on, and how is it resurrected in the works of subsequent generations.

Spine title: Songs of innocence and of experience. Contains critical essays in chronological order of publication.

Modern scholars often find it difficult to account for the profound eccentricities in the work of William Blake, dismissing them as either ahistorical or simply meaningless. But with this pioneering study, Saree Makdisi develops a reliable and comprehensive framework for understanding these peculiarities. According to Makdisi, Blake's poetry and drawings should compel us to reconsider the history of the 1790s. Tracing for the first time the many links among economics, politics, and religion in his work, Makdisi shows how Blake questioned and even subverted the commercial, consumerist, and political liberties that his contemporaries championed, all while developing his own radical aesthetic.

"William Blake is a universal artist--an inspiration to visual artists, musicians, poets, and performers worldwide as well as everyone who aspires to the ideals of personal, spiritual, and creative liberty. His heroic story has inspired an invigorated generations. His personal struggles during a period of political terror and oppression, his technical innovations, and his political commitment all remain deeply relevant today. This book presents a comprehensive overview of Blake's work as a printmaker, poet, and painter, foregrounding his relationship with the art world of his time and telling the stories behind many of his most iconic images."--

William Blake (1757-1827) is considered one of the most singular and brilliant talents that England has ever produced. Celebrated now for the originality of his thinking, painting and verse, he shocked contemporaries by rejecting all forms of organized worship even while adhering to the truth of the Bible. But how did he come to equate Christianity with art? How did he use images and paint to express those radical and prophetic ideas about religion which he came in time to believe? And why did he conceive of Christ himself as an artist: in fact, as the artist, par excellence? These are among the questions which Naomi Billingsley explores in her subtle and wide-ranging new study in art, religion and the history of ideas. Suggesting that Blake expresses through his representations of Jesus a truly distinctive theology of art, and offering detailed readings of Blake's paintings and biblical commentary, she argues that her subject thought of Christ as an artist-archetype. Blake's is thus a distinctively 'Romantic' vision of art in which both the artist and his saviour fundamentally change the way that the world is perceived. In drawing upon contemporaneous religious writings and artistic representations of similar subjects, this book presents an historically grounded account of Blake's oeuvre. It offers new interpretations of his individual works while also identifying textual and pictorial sources that previously have been overlooked. It will have strong interdisciplinary appeal: to intellectual historians; scholars and students of religion and literature; art historians; and all those interested in the vivid figural articulation of a uniquely English theological radicalism.

This brilliant outline of Blake's thought and commentary on his poetry comes on the crest of the current interest in Blake, and carries us further towards an understanding of his work than any previous study. Here is a dear and complete solution to the riddles of the longer poems, the so-called "Prophecies," and a demonstration of Blake's insight that will amaze the modern reader. The first section of the book shows how Blake arrived at a theory of knowledge that was also, for him, a theory of religion, of human life and of art, and how this rigorously defined system of ideas found expression in the complicated but consistent symbolism of his poetry. The second and third parts, after indicating the relation of Blake to English literature and the intellectual atmosphere of his own time, explain the meaning of Blake's poems and the significance of their characters.