ABSTRACT
The author belong to a generation which grew up in the unquestioned belief that every development in human thought and in the arts comes about through breaking with the rules and restraints, a revolutionary iconoclasm which 'frees' the mind of the artist for the production or reception of 'new ideas'. For as the Italian Renaissance drew its inspiration from the Platonic writings translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino, so did the English Romantic Movement from those same works, translated for the first time into English by Thomas Taylor the Platonist. It takes a Platonist to recognise Platonism; and in spite of the conspiracy of silence which has involved Thomas Taylor and his remarkable writings and translations, the poets have discovered him with the same inevitability as the humanist critics have overlooked him. Taylor and William Blake were both engaged in making their attack upon the very root of the irreconcilable difference between the materialist and the Platonic view of man.
