Blake's Humanism

An illustrated study of the social, political and literary thought underlying Blake’s Songs and the Prophetic Books, culminating in Milton. It considers the guiding forces behind Visions of the Daughters of Albion and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the roles of vision and energy in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience and lyrics such as ‘The Mental Traveller’, Blake's attempts at mythological interpretation of current events, first in ‘The French Revolution’ and then in the prophetic books America, Europe and The Song of Los, and how Blake’s fourfold vision is employed as a means of interpreting and illustrating major predecessors such as Milton and Chaucer.

John Beer is well known for his work on English Romantic literature. His books include Coleridge the Visionary, Coleridge's Poetic Intelligence, Blake's Humanism, Blake's Visionary Universe, Wordsworth and the Human Heart, Wordsworth in Time, Romantic Blake to Mary Shelley, Post-Romantic Dickens to Sylvia Plath, Romantic Influences, and William A Literary Life.

Review "It is a pleasure to find a Blake study as good as Dr Beer's.... He has written the most just account yet of Blake's political position' -- Times Literary Supplement

"One of the few guides to which one can concede a certain credit balance of usefulness .... What the author intends [by Blake's 'humanism'] is to emphasise (rightly) the characteristic of Blake's thought expressed in his insistence that Man ... is responsible for determining what his responsibility is" -- F R Leavis