William Blake`s work has been studies from such a wide variety of perspectives that it might appear presumptuous to claim that any major aspect of it has been neglected by his commentators in the English-speaking world.What is attempted in the present study is an elucidation of the poet`s early practice and theory from an angle which,although by no means overlooked,has not been used as a vantage point by too many interpreters.For the critical perspective in question Ludmilla Kostova turns to the Age of Sensibility:the time when Blake`s creative habits were formed.It is generally recognised that the literateurs of that time revised a considerable number of the assumptions about literature which they had inherited from their predecessors.The emergence of a subjective aesthetics and of specific type of literary history is considered to be the major result of their revisionary labours.The author`s contention is that there is a vital connection between Blake`s poetic theory and practice and key mid- and late-eighteenth-century literary-historial ideas.