ABSTRACT
On 17 September 1874 Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote to William Michael Rossetti, asking him to get some information from John Camden Hotten as to the state of the printing of the essay on Blake, and his royalties. Swinburne’s is a creative and fruitful misreading – but a misreading nonetheless. Swinburne writes of Blake as ‘born and baptized into the church of rebels’, writes of his ‘republican passion’, and of his ability to worship: ‘like all men great enough to enjoy greatness, Blake was born with the gift of admiration’. The study of Blake is full of passages of fine prose, as when Swinburne describes the ‘Songs of Innocence’, or Blake’s ‘twofold vision’: He walked and laboured under other heavens, on another earth, than the earth and the heaven of material life. Blake’s mysticism and unorthodox morality, filtered through Swinburne’s lyrical prose, was too much for periodicals like The Saturday Review to accept.
