ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some of the ancestors to whom it is possible to attach a "label". As W. R. Bion says of one of the stray or "wild thoughts" that came to him through Shakespeare, in the form of the apparently commonplace rhyme "Golden lads and girls all must / Like chimney-sweepers, come to dust". Bion was a poetry-reader from his youth. Among those who were lifelong influences he names Milton, Virgil, Homer, Shelley, Keats, Hopkins, Herbert, Donne, and Shakespeare, whom he called "the greatest man who ever lived". Poetry was not always at the forefront of Bion's theorizing, but it certainly always lay behind it, and in his later years he made a special effort to clarify just why he thought poetry was important—for psychoanalysis, perhaps more important than any other epistemology. Like Bion with his Grid, Blake felt driven to "create a System".
