Synopsis
William Blake lived seventy years (1757-1827) mostly in poverty and obscurity, although for a stretch of that time he was in full creative vigour. His impact on his contemporaries was wholly incommensurate with his genius; yet ever since his death his originality of mind, both as a poet and as a painter, has bee recognized. Few of the National Collections are without their fine examples of his pictures, while his better-known poems are now part of the current coin of English literature. The exploration of his genius, as Miss Raine shows in this essay, is still continuing. In her view Blake 'is a figure whose stature overtops all but the greatest of men of genius that England - or for that matter, the western world - has known.
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About the Author
Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) was a British poet and critic. She loved Blake throughout her long and distinguished literary career, and her A.W. Mellon Lectures in Washington in 1962, which became the basis of her two-volume study Blake and Tradition (1968), played a vital part in establishing that Blake, previously known mainly as a self-taught eccentric, belongs to a long and coherent tradition of Platonic, hermetic, and mystical thought.
From the Back Cover
This is a classic study of William Blake, a man for whom the arts were not an end in themselves, but expressed his vision of the spiritual drama of the English national being. This volume presents a comprehensive view of Blake's artistic achievements and a compelling and moving portrait of the life and thought of an extraordinary genius.
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