Golgonooza, City of Imagination

“Raine was a poet, and—for me—a transformative Blake scholar. I remember going to Tate Britain at one point when they had new acquisitions of Blake work and being very dissatisfied with the descriptions of these new works. It was almost as if the curator didn’t quite know what they had bought. That made me turn to Kathleen Raine’s books on Blake, because she offers a complicated but nonetheless clear explanation of where Blake’s images are coming from and where he can be situated in the Neo-Platonic tradition. You don’t have to buy that wholeheartedly to be glad that Kathleen Raine has opened up the deep meaning of these images and allowed you to question that, and to appreciate Blake seriously, not just as some strange, whimsical genius in a world of his own.” Read more...

The best books on William Blake

Mark Vernon, Biographer