Blake and Byron; or, Art and Imagination After the Second Fall

Abstract

The connection between Blake and Byron is well known through Blake’s response to Byron’s Cain in his late engraved work The Ghost of Abel. But the filiations between these two commanding figures of English Romanticism goes out much further and in much deeper, and engages with some of the most important issues in doctrinal Christianity. The article gives a close study of their shared preoccupation with the politics, both psychic and historical, of guilt, retribution, atonement, and forgiveness and their respective, specifically imaginative, treatments of these subjects.