1. Although Blake was a highly original and inventive artist, he was influenced by the attitudes and styles of his time, if only by rejecting them. Research and report on "The Age of Reason" (also known as The Enlightenment") in intellectual history. What were the characteristics of the pictures being painted by others during Blake's lifetime?

2. The image of Blake as a "lonely genius" is misleading. In what ways was he not a solitary, rejected figure?

3. To "synthesize" means to bring separate parts together into a whole.

What is meant by the claim that Blake's ambition was to create a vast synthesis, poetic as well as pictorial?

4. What characteristics of Christianity are evident in Blake's work?

5. The twentieth-century father of psychology, Sigmund Freud, believed the mind was divided into three parts which fought against one another for domina tion. If any...