Blake and Lucretius

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This book demonstrates the way in which William Blake aligned his idiosyncratic concept of the Selfhood ¿ the lens through which the despiritualised subject beholds the material world ¿ with the atomistic materialism of the Epicurean school as it was transmitted through the first-century BC Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius¿ De Rerum Natura. By addressing this philosophical debt, this study sets out a threefold re-evaluation of Blake¿s work: to clarify the classical stream of Blake¿s philosophical heritage through Lucretius, to return Blake to his historical moment, a thirty-year period from 1790 to 1820 which has been described as the second Lucretian moment in England, and to employ a new exegetical model for understanding the phenomenological parameters and epistemological frameworks of Blake¿s mythopoeia. Accordingly, it is revealed that Blake was not only aware of classical atomistic cosmogony and sense-based epistemology but that he systematically mapped postlapsarian existence onto an Epicurean framework.