William Blake. How was he both a Neo-Classicist and a Romantic?
Considered mad for his idiosyncratic views by contemporaries, later criticism regards Blake highly for his expressiveness and creativity, as well as the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterized as part of both the Romantic movement and “Pre-Romantic”, for its largely having appeared in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England, Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Jacob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Antique art and its principles, concepts of idea and decorum, and other seventeenth-century academic at- titudes, indicate clearly that neo-classical art was gov- erned by reason. But such rational ideals embraced, as did the Age of Reason itself, the concept of senti- ment. The literature and art of the period also included extremes of emotion, terror, and horror: the period saw the birth of the “Gothick” no
