William Blake: A Critical Essay

Overview
Algernon Charles Swinburne's "William Blake: A Critical Essay" (1868) mounts a passionate defense and celebration of Blake as one of the most original and commanding voices in English literature and art. The essay traces Blake's development from marginal, misunderstood craftsman to a uniquely prophetic poet whose visions and designs defy the conventional categories of taste and morality. Swinburne insists that Blake's apparent eccentricities are signs of a singular imaginative freedom rather than mere madness or eccentricity.
Writing with an ardent rhetorical energy, Swinburne both interprets and praises Blake's work, combining biographical detail with close readings of poems and prophetic books. He treats Blake's engraving and painting as integral to his poetry, arguing for a unity of word and image that intensifies Blake's visionary effect.

Blake's Life and Reputation
Swinburne sketches Blake's biography to explain how social marginality and critical neglect shaped his reception. He emphasizes the poet's independence from contemporary fashions and institutions, showing how Blake's career unfolded at the margins of literary and artistic circles and why critics of the era often misread him. Swinburne foregrounds episodes and anecdotes that reveal Blake's moral seriousness, uncompromising imagination, and resistance to compromise.
That marginalization, Swinburne argues, has obscured the rational coherence beneath Blake's visionary idiom. Instead of dismissing Blake as a mere eccentric, Swinburne reinterprets episodes of supposed "madness" as manifestations of a prophetic temperament committed to original metaphysical and ethical insights.

Themes and Imagery
Central to Swinburne's reading is Blake's recurrent confrontation with authority, custom, and oppressive religious moralism. He highlights Blake's essential dualities, innocence and experience, restraint and liberation, and reads them as a moral and psychological dialectic rather than a mere decorative motif. Blake's rebellion against narrow conformity and his insistence on imaginative liberty become the foundation for a broader ethical vision that prizes spiritual emancipation.
Swinburne also examines Blake's symbolic lexicon: spectral figures, city and wilderness images, and the recurrent presence of prophetic personae. He treats Blake's symbolic density as a deliberate language of revelation, where mythic form and ethical content interweave to produce a poetry that is both argumenative and devotional.

Poetic Style and Language
Swinburne praises Blake's mastery of prosody and diction, calling attention to the musicality and rhetorical intensity of his verse. He analyzes Blake's use of short lyrical forms and of the prophetic blank verse to sustain a voice that is direct, authoritative, and charged with visionary intensity. For Swinburne, Blake's stylistic range, from the simple music of "Songs of Innocence" to the lofty cadences of the prophetic works, reveals a poet who commands form to serve spiritual and imaginative ends.
Swinburne also admires the integration of visual design and verse, noting how Blake's plates and engravings complement and amplify the poems' meanings. The coupling of line, image, and ornament becomes, in Swinburne's account, a signature of Blake's originality and a challenge to critics who separated art from literature.

Critical Argument and Impact
Swinburne's central claim is that Blake deserves recognition as an indispensable English original, a poet whose intellectual independence and moral intensity place him among the great prophetic voices. He rebuts contemporaries who reduced Blake to an oddity, insisting instead on the poet's coherent philosophical project and sustained aesthetic achievement. Swinburne's ardent rhetoric reframes Blake as a model of imaginative daring and moral seriousness.
The essay itself helped to reshape Blake's reputation in Victorian literary culture, contributing to a revival of interest that would influence later critics and artists. By arguing for Blake's seriousness, unity, and power, Swinburne secures him a place not only as an eccentric visionary but as a major, formative presence in English letters.