Blunt, who himself had contemplated suicide after his humiliation and disgrace in 1979, was deeply impressed by Borromini's morbid memoir and (rather illogically) connected the architect's internal conflict to his artistic power: "To have been under a strain so violent that it drove him to this act of violence — if not of madness — and yet immediately afterwards to be able to dictate such a lucid account of the event, reveals a combination of intense emotional power and rational detachment which are among the qualities which go to make him such a great architect."

Always consistent in his approach, Blunt used the same methods in his book on Blake as he had on Poussin and Borromini. He examined "the sources of his style, his relation to his contemporaries' painting, his development as an artist". In a rather strained effort, Blunt began and then immediately abandoned a false comparison of two wildly different painters: "One artist might at first sight seem to provide an analogy with Poussin . . . William Blake. With him it is certainly true that his philosophical and religious beliefs formed the starting point of his creation, but the analogy would not be fair."

Blunt saw Blake, paradoxically, as both a traditionalist and a revolutionary: "He used the works of his contemporaries as freely as he did those of the dead — and in the same way, because what he took from them he made wholly his own . . . When he borrows a pose from some other artist, he so completely transforms the figure that it seems to be wholly Blakean." Like all artists, Blake was certainly influenced by other painters. But since he recreated their work in his own extremely personal style, he did not follow tradition but broke it.

Blunt shared one significant characteristic with his subject. The ideas of the French Revolution had a similar impact on Blake as those of the Russian Revolution later had on Blunt, and both revolutions provoked their liberation from the old order. Blunt's biographer Miranda Carter notes that he "made Blake's tangle with revolutionary politics, and his subsequent retreat from them, the central drama of the poet's life. What he most directly responded to in Blake was the natural opposition to authority." Blunt also supported and then retreated from the Revolution. He first subverted the authority of the British government, then tried to break away from his Russian authority and was finally broken by British authority.

In his 1943 article "Blake's Pictorial Imagination", Blunt wrote that the ideas of the French Revolution "seemed intensely real and vitally important, and [Blake] expressed them in a series of revolutionary works, in the political as well as in the literary sense." In a self-reflective passage, he concluded that Blake's "interest in politics had always been more emotional than practical, and after the [reign of terror] of 1794 he withdrew entirely into the field of the intellect". But there was also one important difference between author and subject. Blake was, according to his painter-friend Samuel Palmer, "one of the few to be met with in our passage through life who are not, in some way or other, ‘double minded' and inconsistent with themselves". By contrast, these contradictory qualities ruled Blunt's double life.