SOURCE: "Blake's Religion of Imagination," in The Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism, Vol. XIV, No. 3, March, 1956, pp. 359-69.

Gleckner is an American scholar who has produced many volumes of criticism on Blake's poetry. His book The Piper & the Bard (1959) is considered one of the major scholarly commentaries on Songs of Innocence and of Experience. In the following essay, Gleckner discusses the role of imagination and perception in Blake's mythological system and in his poetic technique.

Blake's view of the imagination as both a religious and a poetical concept has been examined in several different ways, but there is another approach to the problem which seems to me most revealing: an examination of the concept of the imagination in Blake's aesthetic (and poetic) in terms of the very system that spawned and comprehended it. The main difficulty in any approach, of course, is the fundamental one of definition, the...