Obsolete Blake Scholars

I came home today from Moscow to discover a parcel awaiting me at the post office containing the two volumes of Kathleen Raine's 'Blake and Tradition'. I cannot think why it has taken me so long to acquire a copy of this, her seminal study, of her 'master'. My copy is an ex-library copy (from the US) in beautiful condition. It is a text that C.S. Lewis described as rendering all previous Blake scholarship as 'obsolete'!

Kathleen read, over eight years, all that Blake is known to have read (mainly in the Reading Room of the British Library) discovering that Blake was not, as he had appeared, simply an 'eccentric' but as a representative of an unfolding tradition of sacred wisdom; and, like any such, both an inheritor and a transformer of insight.

I greatly look forward to reading it, holding it is a joy.

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