Blakes Poetry: Spectral Visions

William Blake is acknowledged as a poet of opposition and contradiction: a writer who, from Songs of Innocence and Experience to his last epic Jerusalem, ceaselessly explored the conflicts between limitation and possibility, reason and energy, torment and joy. But the contradictions within Blakes own visionary poetics are less often considered. Throughout his work, Blake powerfully dramatises the energies and agonies of his own poetic labour.