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William Blake's Enemies
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 58, Number 3, Summer 2018
- pp. 703-729
- 10.1353/sel.2018.0028
- Article
- Additional Information
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ABSTRACT:
William Blake famously exhibited an acute sense of his own public neglect and persecution. This article uses the poet's annotations to Johann Caspar Lavater's Aphorisms on Man (1788) to reconstruct a theory of the enemy, one that at once refigures Blake's embrace of contraries, informs his aesthetic commitment to the determining line, and gives critical credence to his anger.