ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that bricolage is a striking feature of the organisation of William Blake’s poetry, a feature shared by many whose writing responded to and was shaped by the Revolution controversy. At the root of Blake’s attitude to the Bible lies a hostility to the very notion of the pure text, the text which gains authority from its claim to be sacred and original. Iain McCalman has shown how ultraradicals in the period 1795–1840 produced a variegated political discourse that was an eclectic combination of a variety of received repertoires. Part of the complexity of Blake’s work from the 1790s onwards stems from fact that he drew on disparate discourses to create a bricolage which has features in common with the work of Spence, and other radicals. McCalman’s recognition of both of the elements in Spence’s work has led him to place Spence within ‘a long history of convergence between millenarian religious ideas and popular forms of scepticism and materialism’.
