William Blake

One of a series designed to provide a new, accessible approach to the works of great poets and playwrights. Each text includes general notes on the text; discussion of themes, issues and context; and suggestions for further reading.

No work has challenged its readers like Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. His ‘Proverbs of Hell’ have been culled for the slogans of student protest and become axioms of modern thought. Iconoclastic, bizarre, unprecedented, it is all of these. Most extraordinary is the revolutionary method of its making. The Bodleian Library copy is one of the first that Blake printed using the method he called ‘Illuminated Printing’ and the only work in which he signifies its importance. This new edition includes a complete facsimile of the work, together with a transcript, and a plate-by-plate guide to text, the interlinear figures, and the larger designs, supplied in the commentary. Drawings from Blake’s Manuscript Notebook used as a basis for the designs together with working proof impressions are reproduced in this volume, showing how the work evolved. In a special section, the same plate from each of the other eight surviving copies is also reproduced to show how over a period of more than 30 years Blake altered the way each copy was finished. The introduction discusses the work’s literary and historical background, the printing process used to produce it and the question of why the work was published without an imprint identifying the author and printer.

No work has challenged its readers like Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. His ‘Proverbs of Hell’ have been culled for the slogans of student protest and become axioms of modern thought. Iconoclastic, bizarre, unprecedented, it is all of these. Most extraordinary is the revolutionary method of its making. The Bodleian Library copy is one of the first that Blake printed using the method he called ‘Illuminated Printing’ and the only work in which he signifies its importance. This new edition includes a complete facsimile of the work, together with a transcript, and a plate-by-plate guide to text, the interlinear figures, and the larger designs, supplied in the commentary. Drawings from Blake’s Manuscript Notebook used as a basis for the designs together with working proof impressions are reproduced in this volume, showing how the work evolved. In a special section, the same plate from each of the other eight surviving copies is also reproduced to show how over a period of more than 30 years Blake altered the way each copy was finished. The introduction discusses the work’s literary and historical background, the printing process used to produce it and the question of why the work was published without an imprint identifying the author and printer.

These poems are one of the treasures of world literature, simple enough to resonate with children, but with enough exoteric and esoteric meaning to keep a gnostic sage pondering for several lifetimes. Sacred Texts

EN Ö PÅ MÅNEN är en helt absurd berättelse av den store engelske klassikern, poeten och konstnären William Blake. Ön på månen är i själva verket London, och året är 1784. Huvudpersonerna i denna "sannfärdiga och nyttiga skildring av Livet & Omständigheterna på Månen" är tre filosofer, av vilka den ene - Cynikern Quid - är William Blake själv. De andra två filosoferna och hela raden av figurer representerar kända personer i den miljö som Blake levde i. I deras burleska samtal gisslar Blake obarmhärtigt dumdryghet, skrytsamhet och skenhelighet. För att läsaren inte skall sväva i ovisshet om vad och vilka som avses har översättaren givit en utförlig personförteckning och introduktion till detta märkliga verk.

This edition contains a facsimile of each page of Blake's original illustrated mauscript with the text in a clear modern font on the facing page.

In addition to a broad selection of the poems, the volume includes over 100 images (16 in color), emphasizing the centrality of pictorial representations to Blake’s verse. Biographical context is provided through dozens of excerpts from Blake’s notebook, letters, marginalia, and other writings. “Criticism” offers twenty wide-ranging commentaries by writers from Blake’s contemporaries to present-day critics, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Northrop Frye, Allen Ginsberg, Morris Eaves, Harold Bloom, Alicia Ostriker, John Mee, Saree Makdisi, and Julia Wright. A section on Textual Technicalities, a Chronology of Blake’s life and work, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index of Titles and First Lines are also included.

William Blake is one of Britain's most fascinating writers, who, as well as being a groundbreaking poet, is also well known as a painter, engraver, radical and mystic. This collection brings together a selection of Blake's poems, including the poems: "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience", to give a singular picture of this unique genius.