William Blake

(9) But while this foregrounding of the construction of poetic reputation results in Baxter's most sophisticated account in poetry of this ambivalent and evasive figure, 'Burns' goes on to sidestep neatly the sceptical manoeuvres of the first three stanzas, lapsing frustratingly into Blakeian hymnody: 'he who carries afire in the heart and eyes / Dies not till the world dies'.

This marginal "charged space" is realized via Jaffe's insistence on dream and wilderness, suggesting in effect that language together with a kind of dialectical Blakeian energy can still generate a species of sacred space.

As I will go on to suggest, following the trail blazed by the Blakeian enigma, Expressway takes up the paradox of the personal and the communal by inhabiting--albeit problematically--the lyric form.

Eitan Bar-Yosef compares Joanna Southcott's Blakeian, anti-imperialist prophesies of the egalitarian New Jerusalem in Britain with millenarian Richard Brothers's rhetorical support for British conquest of the Holy Land as a precondition to constructing a New Jerusalem there.

Environmental historian Tom Griffiths conjures up an image of the mighty rivers of Australia as tigers, stirring powerful emotions; for me a Blakeian nostalgia deepened in memory by the majestic Murray River of my youth.