eaven and a new Earth.' Blake's The French Revolution (1791) and America, a Prophecy (1793) portrayed these revolutions as portents of the last days of the world before the Apocalypse. The violent, creative energy of this period of revolution and fundamental societal change, frequently called the 'spirit of the age' inspired Blake to announce the beginning of a new age. With his contemporaries he believed that everything was now possible, and that the example of the French Revolution was the best hope for beleaguered humanity, and that he was living in a time of promise of renewal for the whole world. In a sense the artists of the day could not help but be rebels; their art was a reaffirmation of Life, of spontaneous creativity in an increasingly regimented, capitalist society which threatened to dehumanise and mechanise the minds of it's workers.
             Blake's style of writing also had a real relevance to the political situation of the day. Many of his fellow craftsmen felt threatened by the increasing power of the major industrialists and feared, rightly, that they would lose the 'masterless freedom' they then enjoyed. His use of the popular oral form in his Sonqs and his later use of Los the blacksmith/poet as a narrator placed him as an advocate of the class who opposed the war with France and the new Industrialism, along with his method of examining established texts and his hostility to academicism. Blake himself said that "General Knowledge is Remote Knowledge~ and he consequently examined other authors with a somewhat aggressive self-confidence. He treated each author as his equal or less, even the Old Testament prophets, whom he regarded as worse than unenlightened. He saw a battle between polite culture and imagination and claimed (as Los) that he must "create his own system or be enslaved by another man's." Blake worked on the premise that experience must be
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