"Makdisi’s book is the best on Blake since the flourishing of poststructuralist criticism in the 1980s. Equally adept at reconstructing the popular politics of the 1790s and theorizing Blake’s proto-Marxist understanding of that politics, Makdisi brilliantly explicates Blake’s critique of the intersecting forms of domination in British society, tracing the origins of Blake’s insights to the radical traditions of seventeenth-century antinomianism. In my view, Makdisi reads Blake exactly as Blake wished to be read. While his powerful identification with Blake yields a continuous stream of original insight, his insistence on Blake’s uncompromising radicalism tends to overlook the poet’s abiding contradictions. These contradictions (between urgency and detachment, for example) defined Blake’s political identity; they also continue to inform progressive criticism to this day, helping to explain why that criticism has relied so heavily on the emotions for evidence of its agency."