"Against the backdrop of Britain's underground eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century homosexual culture, mob persecutions, and executions of homosexuals, Blake and Homosexuality shows how the Romantic poet-artist's hatred of sexual and religious hypocrisy and state repression, and his revolutionary social vision, led him gradually to accept homosexuality as an integral part of human sexuality.

In the process, Blake rejected the antihomosexual bias of British radical tradition, revised his own early idealization of male heterosexual aggression, developed a less male-centered view of gender, and refined his conception of the cooperative commonwealth."--BOOK JACKET.