There is nothing stranger in the history of English literature than the miracle by which this poet and artist, working in obscurity, utterly unknown to the literary world that existed outside him, summed up in himself all the thoughts and tendencies which were the fruit of anxious discussion and propaganda on the part of the authors--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb--who believed themselves to be the discoverers of fresh truth unknown to their generation.

The contemporary and independent discovery by Wallace and Darwin of the principle of natural selection furnishes, perhaps, a rough parallel, but the fact serves to show how impalpable and universal is the spread of ideas, how impossible it is to settle literary indebtedness or construct literary genealogy with any hope of accuracy.
Blake, by himself, held and expressed quite calmly that condemnation of the "classic" school that Wordsworth and Coleridge proclaimed against the opposition of a deriding world.

As was his habit he compressed it into a rude epigram, "Great things are done when men and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street." The case for nature against urbanity could not be more tersely nor better put.

The German metaphysical doctrine which was the deepest part of the teaching of Wordsworth and Coleridge and their main discovery, he expresses as curtly and off-handedly, "The sun's light when he unfolds it, Depends on the organ that beholds it." In the realm of childhood and innocence, which Wordsworth entered fearfully and pathetically as an alien traveller, he moves with the simple and assured ease of one native.

He knows the mystical wonder and horror that Coleridge set forth in _The Ancient Mariner_.