5.5. Other Critics
5.5.1. William Blake
5.5.2. Thomas de Quincey
5.5.3. Thomas Carlyle
5.5.1. William Blake (1757-1827)
Blake's random annotations, collected in his Vision of the Last Judgment have more direct links with cabbalistic and occult tradition than with literary criticism, but in then we find an opposition to 18th-century rationalism and its continuation in Utilitarianism and the scientific ideal. The same reaction is apparent in his annotations to Reynolds' Discourses, where he values individuality as opposed to the neoclassical emphasis on "general ideas." Blake is a latter-day Platonist for whom the only real world is that of the imagination, and the real world is a mere shadow. From this metaphysical basis, Blake goes on to develop on his own some remarkable comments on imagination, symbolism, etc. that make of him the most original English romantic thinker. He stresses genius and "visionary fancy, or imagination" above any other quality : "Ages are all equal. But genius is above the age." And he takes the idea of divine inspiration quite literally. Blake represents the most mystical side of English Romanticism. Like Shelley, Blake proposes a didacticism of revolution.
5.5.2. Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859)
De Quincey is best known as the whimsical author of essays such as Confessions of an English Opium-Eater or "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts." As a theorist of literature, he draws a distinction along typically Romantic lines between a "literature of knowledge" which works through discursive understanding, and teaches, to a "literature of power" which works on the Kantian reason and the emotions, and moves.
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