In the final decades of the nineteenth century, William Blake’s work was rescued from its long obscurity by those, like Algernon Charles Swinburne and William Butler Yeats, who found within it the possibilities for a humanist aesthetic practice that could engage (and possibly transform) the world without being bound to it. Swinburne’s seminal William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868) and Yeats’s eclectic edition of The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical (1893) are landmarks of fin-de-siècle literary culture. Together they provide an index to Blake’s importance for late Victorian writers; they also afford insight into many of the period’s characteristic preoccupations and concerns. ‘To him all symbolic things were literal, all literal things symbolic’, Swinburne writes, adding that Blake ‘walked and laboured under other heavens, on another earth, than the earth and heaven of material life’. As Swinburne makes clear, the crucial distinction is not between (material) earth and (immaterial) heaven but between a mind shackled to material life by the ‘mechanical intellect’ and a mind liberated from that life by what Yeats, referring to Blake, described as ‘the visionary realism’ of the imagination. For these later poets, Blake’s work was most compelling for its recreation of the world – all of heaven and of earth too – within the space of the imagination, a recreation that was also a redemption. Blake knew that ‘imagination was the first emanation of divinity’, writes Yeats, and that ‘the imaginative arts were therefore the greatest of Divine revelations’.