Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law

E.P. Thompson's long-awaited book on William Blake--completed shortly before his death last year. Brilliantly reexamining Blake's cultural milieu and intellectual background, Thompson brings a startling new richness and clarity to Blake's poetic language and imagery. "Engaging and useful . . . fascinatingly displays a splendid historian at work".--The Nation.
Witness Against the Beast is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study in which the renowned social historian E.P. Thompson contends that most of the assumptions scholars have made about William Blake are misleading and unfounded. Brilliantly reexamining Blake's cultural milieu and intellectual background, Thompson detects in Blake's poetry a repeated call to resist the usury and commercialism of the "Antichrist" embodied by contemporary society--to "witness against the beast."