William Blake's importance to aestheticist thought

Anthony H. Harrison, Professor of English, North Carolina State University

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Note 6, chapter 2, in the author's Swinburne's Medievalism: A Study in Victorian Love Poetry which Louisiana State University Press published in 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

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Significant as an indication of how important Swinburne's William Blake was to aestheticist thought in England is Donald Hill's acknowledgment that Walter Pater "probably got his incentive" for the first essay of The Renaissance from these""two or three pages of Swinburne's" book. In Hill's superb edition of The Renaissance (Berkeley, 1980), 303, he also notes the same perception in Germain d'Hangest's Walter Pater: L'Homme et Ouevre (2 vols.; Paris, 1961), I, 356n57. For further discussion of the subject, see Charlesworth, Dark Passages, 33-35.

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Last modified June 2000

Last modified 8 June 2007