William Blake and the Moderns

Robert Bertholf and Annette Levitt have assembled thirteen essays that establish Blake as a “central voice molding modern literature and thought.” The essays in this volume examine Blake’s influence on modern poetry, the modern novel, and modern thought from various critical approaches. This collection maps out the lines of direct literary influences and indirect intellectual affinities that make up the tradition of enacted form. Through the use of various aspects of Blake’s form and ideas, this book reasserts the idea of continuity, the drive for wholeness, and the arrival of new poetic forms.

Blake is considered one of the major and most modern of Romantics. This collection positions him as a precursor of the modern, using his vision and poetry as a base for discussing a central issue in literary theory today―influence and the literary tradition―just how is the legacy of a literary artist passed on, and how is it resurrected in the works of subsequent generations.