"After a century in which sentiment and pathos had tried to substitute for passion in poetry, Blake returned passion to it, with the consequent elevation of style. He took the wan humanitarianism, sentimental and self-indulgent, of his time and forced it into a startling humanism, imaginative and profoundly social. He seized upon the abstract and bloodless conceptions of political radicalism and thrust them into their necessary habitat, the heart and the brain, the human fact." —Mark Schorer William Blake