Known for his prophetic and imaginative works of poetry, painting, and printmaking, the Romantic artist William Blake was also a prolific reader and annotator of other writers' works. Through them Blake worked out his own (at times) difficult and abstruse system of thought. This is the first work of criticism to consider Blake's annotations in their entirety, and it covers such topics as art, poetry, theology, madness and philosophy, as well as the authors Lavater, Swedenborg, Bacon, Spurzheim, Berkeley, and Wordsworth, among others.