First published in 1982 this book provides a bibliography of commentary, criticism, and scholarship on the works of William Blake. It covers the period from Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry in 1947 to 1980. The criticism is organised according to eleven classifications in order to help direct the research of students and scholars and each chapter is preceded by an introductory essay in order to guide the reader.

Expectation of the millennium was widespread in English society at the end of the eighteenth century. The essays in this volume explore how exactly, this expectation shaped, and was shaped by, the literature, art, and politics of the period we now call romantic. An expanded and rehistorized canon of writers and artists is assembled, a group united by a common tendency to use figurations of the millennium to interrogate and transform the worlds in which they lived and moved. Coleridge, Cowper, Blake, and Byron are placed in new contexts created by original research into the artistic and political subcultures of radical London, into the religious sects surrounding the Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott, and into the cultural and political contexts of orientalism and empire.