To the Palace of Wisdom

“Drawing his thesis from Blake’s seminal statement, ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,’ Martin Price has produced an almost formidably imposing and rich analysis of ‘the way in which movements of ideas interact with literary form in Restoration and 18th-Century England, stressing the dialectical excess as much as the balance and moderation of the Augustans.’ The book explores ‘the conflict within Augustan literature’ in order to account for ‘the new directions poetry takes in the later 18th Century.”—Library Journal