Introduction

Early in the course of reading and annotating the mass of William Blake scholarship and criticism produced since the publication of Frye's Fearful Symmetry in 1947. There is a pragmatics of Blake study that involves time invested and profit extracted. The Blake who has been the centre of so much idealistic criticism since 1947 is Frye's Blake, the poet of visionary imagination and a guide to Christian interpretations of literature. Middleton Murry's Blake is a Christian-Marxist. English critics go about trying to fit Blake into their own eighteenth century while some American critics wrestle with Blake's message to America and others turn to Blake as a worthy subject for their shiny new critical surgery. The degree to which Blake's entire work can be reduced to uniform, systematic comprehensibility does not affect the degree to which his work has an effect upon any individual reader.