Blake

by William Blake, Richard Wilbur (Editor)

"After a century in which sentiment and pathos had tried to substitute for passion in poetry, Blake returned passion to it, with the consequent elevation of style. He took the wan humanitarianism, sentimental and self-indulgent, of his time and forced it into a startling humanism, imaginative and profoundly social. He seized upon the abstract and bloodless conceptions of political radicalism and thrust them into their necessary habitat, the heart and the brain, the human fact."
--Mark Schorer
William Blake

Genres: Poetry

158 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake's work is today considered seminal and significant in the history of both poetry and the visual arts.

Blake's prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the language". His visual artistry has led one modern critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced." Although he only once travelled any further than a day's walk outside London over the course of his life, his creative vision engendered a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced 'imagination' as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself".

Once considered mad for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is highly regarded today for his expressiveness and creativity, and the philosophical and mystical currents that underlie his work. His work has been characterized as part of the Romantic movement, or even "Pre-Romantic", for its largely having appeared in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the established Church, Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Emanuel Swedenborg.

Despite these known influences, the originality and singularity of Blake's work make it difficult to classify. One 19th century scholar characterised Blake as a "glorious luminary", "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors."

Reviews

[Henry Sturcke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A convenient selection of Blake's poems, small enough to fit in one's pocket on a hike or train trip, slim enough for one's nightstand. Contains all of his best-known works, "How sweet I roamed," "Ah Sunflower," "Tyger, Tyger," and "Auguries of Innocence" ("To see a world in a grain of sand"), as well as excerpts from longer poems. There is a table of contents; it would have been nice to have an index as well, in alphabetical order. But given the small number of poems, and the fact that most are referred to by their first-lines, this is not a serious defect.
Blake is one of the strangest poets in the English language. Some of his poems are childlike in their simplicity and technically faulty, others remain locked in a hermetic world of the poet's making. But time spent reading and rereading them yields delights. Doors of perception, indeed.

[Craven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let's put it this way, I really liked everything I understood.