ABSTRACT
This chapter provides items in three categories: excerpts of comments on William Blake, surveys of Blake's reputation and essays on Blake's reputation. G. E. Bentley's "Introduction," includes sections on "Blake's Critical Reputation" and "Blake Studies." The comments are the comments of his "Blake's Reputation and Interpreters," pp. 15–51 of Blake Books. Deborah Dorfman's Blake and the Nineteenth Century is a well-documented, thorough survey of Blake's reputation from his own day up to the Ellis-Yeats edition of Blake's work, 1893. Blake, according to T. S. Eliot, had left both Poetry and The Tradition behind and was spelunking in his own world of ideas. Blake was held in great esteem by the generation of the 1960's in America, by Allen Ginsberg, N. O. Brown, Theodore Roszak and R. D. Laing. The American critical machine saw in Blake a fitting challenge to its relentless exegetical expertise. Both generated the Age of Blake.
