Blake's Humanism

An illustrated study of the social, political and literary thought underlying Blake's Songs and the Prophetic Books, culminating in Milton. The text is enriched with fourteen full page black and white plates and over forty hyperlinks to major online Blake collections. Second hand copies of the book cost £100 or more and unlike hard copies this electronic version takes you to sources of full colour illustrations, guided by John Beer's brilliant commentary. 



First published by Manchester University Press. Digitised by Humanities-Ebooks, 2007



1. Blake and his Readers. Varying conceptions of Blake's achievement.

2. A Fourfold Vision. Blake, Milton and Allegory: the complex organisation of his vision.

3. The energies of Desire. The guiding forces behind Visions of the Daughters of Albion and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

4. The Lion and the Rose. The roles of vision and energy in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience and lyrics such as “The Mental Traveller”.

5. The Genius of Revolution. The attempts at mythological interpretation of current events, first in “The French Revolution” and then in the prophetic books America, Europe and The Song of Los

6. The Descending Vision. Milton: Developed myth-making as a means of interpreting the artist's task and previous literature.

7. All Things Humanised. Blake's fourfold vision employed as a means of interpreting and illustrating major predecessors such as Milton and Chaucer.

8. Unwanted Prospero. Blake's lasting commitment to imaginative vision as a key to human liberty.

Appendix One: The Development of Blake's Mythology.

Appendix Two: The Gates of Paradise: a guide to interpretation.



Professor John Bernard Beer, M.A., Ph.D., Litt.D., FBA, Coleridge scholar, Emeritus Fellow of Peterhouse, and former Research Fellow of St John’s College FBA (31 March 1926 – 10 December 2017) was a critic of British literature. . Best known as a scholar and critic of Romanticism – especially William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth – he was also published on E. M. Forster. John was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1994. Beer served in the Royal Air Force from 1946 to 1948, a junior research fellow at St John's College, Cambridge, from 1955 to 1958 and between 1958 and 1964 he was assistant lecturer and then lecturer at the University of Manchester. From 1964 until his retirement in 1993, he was successively lecturer, reader (1978) and professor (1987) of English literature at the University of Cambridge. His other roles included; President of the Charles Lamb Society from 1989 until 2002, Leverhulme emeritus fellow in 1995–1996. and Stanton lecturer in the philosophy of religion in the University of Cambridge in 2006.