This book is an exploration of the attitudes towards, and treatments for, madness in the age before the mass asylum and the emergence of the psychiatric profession.

Most simply, the Romantic poets came to recognize political solutions as inevitable failures, and political poetry as not poetry at all, but versified propaganda that does not endure beyond timely or contemporary events and that cannot explore motives of deeper significance about the human condition. Meanwhile, radicals viewed concern for black slaves as a fanciful distraction obfuscating wage slavery, the oppression of the English working class, and the hellish life of the laboring masses during the Industrial Revolution. Following the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1807) the plight of the fettered African slaves in the West Indies faded into the larger concern over the "enslaved" masses in England.

For William Blake, the idea of slavery was fundamental to his art and writing. Containing over 60 reproductions from Blake's illuminated books, watercolours and engravings, this book includes essays by curator and leading Blake scholar David Bindman, and novelist and literary critic Darryl Pinckney.

Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field provides a guide to applying a poet’s imagination and precision of language to the healing endeavours of psychoanalysis while making a lucid journey through 2,000 years of transformative poetry from Virgil, Dante and Blake to the contemporary poet Claudia Rankine. Patients enter treatment with the hope of being recognized and the hope for transformation of a painful experience. David Shaddock shows how poetry can guide psychoanalysts towards meeting that hope. The book is based on the proposition that an accurate recognition of what is leads to the opening of what could be. The imaginative space that opens between poem and reader or therapist and patient can be a place of healing and transformation. Poetry and Psychoanalysis will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in using literature and creativity as inspiration for both their clinical work and personal growth, as well as all who love poetry.

William Blake is one of England’s most fascinating writers; he was not only a groundbreaking poet, but also a painter, engraver, radical, and mystic. Although Blake was dismissed as an eccentric by his contemporaries, his powerful and richly symbolic poetry has been a fertile source of inspiration to the many writers and artists who have followed in his footsteps. In this collection Patti Smith brings together her personal favorites of Blake’s poems, including the complete Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, to give a singular picture of this unique genius, whom she calls in her moving introduction “the spiritual ancestor” of generations of poets.

William Blake, overlooked in his time, remains an enigmatic figure to contemporary readers despite his near canonical status. Out of a wounding sense of alienation and dividedness he created a profoundly original symbolic language, in which words and images unite in a unique interpretation of self and society. He was a counterculture prophet whose art still challenges us to think afresh about almost every aspect of experience—social, political, philosophical, religious, erotic, and aesthetic. He believed that we live in the midst of Eternity here and now, and that if we could open our consciousness to the fullness of being, it would be like experiencing a sunrise that never ends. Following Blake’s life from beginning to end, acclaimed biographer Leo Damrosch draws extensively on Blake’s poems, his paintings, and his etchings and engravings to offer this generously illustrated account of Blake the man and his vision of our world. The author’s goal is to inspire the reader with the passion he has for his subject, achieving the imaginative response that Blake himself sought to excite. The book is an invitation to understanding and enjoyment, an invitation to appreciate Blake’s imaginative world and, in so doing, to open the doors of our perception.

Bronowski was fascinated by William Blake for much of his life. His first book about him, A Man Without a Mask , was published in 1944. In 1958 his famous Penguin selection of Blake's poems and letters was published. As further testimony to Bronowski's enthusiasm it should be noted that the final plate in the book of his great TV series The Ascent of Man is Blake's frontispiece to Songs of Experience . William Blake and the Age of Revolution , first published in 1965, is, in some ways, a revised edition of A Man Without a Mask, in others, a new book. In it Bronowski gives a stimulating interpretation of Blake's art and poetry in the context of the revolutionary period in which he was working. Like all of Bronowski's writings it dazzles with wide-ranging erudition, making this work far removed from conventional literary criticism.