What do you think?
Rate this book
The Portable Blake
The Portable Blake contains the hermetic genius's most important Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience in their entirety; selections from his "prophetic books"—including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , Visions of the Daughters of Abion , America , The Book of Urizen , and The Four Zoas —and from other works of poetry and prose, as well as the complete drawings for The Book of Job .
713 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1946
54 people are currently reading
599 people want to read
About the author
William Blake
1,230 books3,202 followersWilliam 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."
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."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
November 18, 2008
I will be currently-reading this until the day I die.
October 16, 2024
I'm a big fan of these old Portable editions from the 50s, which live up to their name & seem durable as hell, but while I enjoyed having about 200 pages of Blake's prose I feel a Complete Poems would be a much better investment, as the letters are mostly mundane and his art criticism is pretty repetitive (he loves Raphael, but hates Titian and Rubens). The poems are, as far as I can tell, mostly here, aside from excerpting away some parts of Milton, Jerusalem, and the Four Zoas.
When it comes to reading Blake's poetry, I think the best place to start is with the Auguries Of Innocence. It is an old-spirited, cataloguic poem which resembles ancient chorales and psalms, effectively listing things in the natural world, but with an eerie and paranoid sense that defies easy characterization, amounting to a celebration of the natural cycles of life (both animal and human, both the beautiful and the violent) in no elated terms, but neither with the common morbid anxiety associated with one despairing at the cycles of life (as in, say, the scherzo to Mahler's second symphony). Rather, it is mostly just an exaltation of the Being of all these things, singing them as in an Homeric Hymn or tragic chorale. The profundity Blake finds in the motions of the world is unique sui generis, at once a paranoid distrust and a driving affirmation.
This mood, with varying levels of clarity, permeate the Songs of Innocence, and Experience, written concurrently, which have the same basic project of perceiving the objects and entities of the world under this schizoid eye. These were the only poems of Blake I had read until I read this book, and for a while I had felt Blake quite over-rated, particularly because these poems are often, taken by themselves, trivial and mundane, and seem mostly attractive for their baby-like ballad rhythms (at which I do not feel Blake is particularly expert; a brute 2/4 prosodic rhythm is often smotheringly common, and he is painfully inconsistent at using head syllables which make the rhymes almost impossible to read fluently without memorizing the poem). The best of these poems, like London or the Tyger, succeed by merit of marrying an individually interesting poetic elenchus to the schizophrenic hysteria Blake sees in all nature, which make these short poems thin and innocent veneers over a barely-concealed apocalyptic breakdown.
Ultimately, and perhaps unfortunately, Blake is at root an esoteric writer, like Plato or Yeats, whose writings are informed by an underlying and obscure world-view not immediately given to the reader and by which context the poems are truly meaningful. His prose writings are not particularly helpful, but the prophetic books amount to something resembling an explanation of how Blake saw the world: from the Marriage of Heaven and Hell we can see one of Blake's main preoccupations, namely, his feeling that it is arbitrary and false to privelege the rational/legalistic nature of the divine over the material/desiderative; that is to say, he feels traditional Christian dualism between the mind and the body is misleading, since both are instantiate things and therefore subordinate to the truly divine. The inferiority of Satan's rule of material things, therefore, is merely a claim postulated by the angels enacting the legal rule of the rational domain, and a wrong road for those seeking the truth. Blake, however, is not of the gnostic sect that took this claim to suggest that wanton crime was true Christian praxis, but rather seems to ally himself fundamentally with the soul and its most important, as Blake feels it, capacity: the imagination. Blind indulgence in both rational matters (for Blake, the overly complex theological arguments of Swedenborg) and carnal matters.
Some of the prophetic books deal with this problem from a naturalistic perspective, or narrating the creation of this metaphysical dynamic through tales of theogony, but Blake seems to have been more interested in its application to man, particularly in his current epoch. It seems to me that Blake made the (very wise) identification between man's embrace of the desiderative and political liberalism, and regarded this identification as at once profound but ultimately a mistake. In the prophetic poem America, Blake depicts the (then recent) founders of America as naive heroes having liberated human desire from traditional bounds of structural control (eg, European monarchy) but, in so doing, initiated the destruction of all order, both social and metaphysical. The longer epic poems, like Four Zoas and Jerusalem, chronicle this total eschaton in hysteric (and mostly incoherent) detail, amounting to an end to rationality, the possibility of law, and all natural and physical things, which was to be followed (as some letters and prose writings indicate more clearly) by an ineffable reunification of all beings in heaven, or something else transcendentally mysterious in that manner.
Blake's main feeling about liberalism across these poems is less that it is good or wise for initiating this type of eschaton, but rather that it goes wrong in attempting to rationalize it, and I think he may indicate in some of his other epic poems, like Europe or The Daughters of Albion, that the example set by America and the French Revolution are not the actual arbiters of the apocalypse, but rather a sign post meant to inspire the proper gnosis, supposedly to take place in England (leaving it to them, I suppose, is why I'm still physico-rationally instantiate to write this review) by those of proper imagination. For Blake, the correct praxis to take from this understanding of the material - rational dyad is to radically accept the noblest and purest emotions in man, namely aesthetic imagination and personal love, and to reject the impure manifestations of either (verbose intellectualism, myopic greed). It's said that Blake was mostly an isolated and obscure person, who did little but paint and have sex with his wife (and maybe others, given that his theories led him to conclude polyamory was what God intended for man), so, in effect, these esoteric eschatological theories amount to a justification of the two main activities Blake did for most of his life.
These theories are interesting, and perhaps applicable to a wide variety of situations, but their abstract and willfully irrational character make their presentation in these poems rather difficult to think about beyond marvelling at how Blake utilises them for poetic purposes. I had mentioned above the rabid, intense effect his poetic project lends to his simple ballad writings, and his prophetic books are overflowing with non-stop, machine gun images in fourteener after fourteener, tens of thousands of which he seems to have written in hallucinatory binges. They are, then, almost incredibly rich and flowing, lacking obvious hack-marks of repetitions and cliches (beyond his fixations) and make for incredibly rich reading. I think, perhaps, my main regret is that I had a simple text book, and not an art book with the paintings and etchings which he produced to accompany these poems.
In all, this book, or some other book containing these poems, are absolutely worth reading. I also really do like these Portable editions, perhaps alone for their binding: my copy is almost seventy years old, and still holds together beautiful with solid, ergonomically delightful droopy pages.
When it comes to reading Blake's poetry, I think the best place to start is with the Auguries Of Innocence. It is an old-spirited, cataloguic poem which resembles ancient chorales and psalms, effectively listing things in the natural world, but with an eerie and paranoid sense that defies easy characterization, amounting to a celebration of the natural cycles of life (both animal and human, both the beautiful and the violent) in no elated terms, but neither with the common morbid anxiety associated with one despairing at the cycles of life (as in, say, the scherzo to Mahler's second symphony). Rather, it is mostly just an exaltation of the Being of all these things, singing them as in an Homeric Hymn or tragic chorale. The profundity Blake finds in the motions of the world is unique sui generis, at once a paranoid distrust and a driving affirmation.
This mood, with varying levels of clarity, permeate the Songs of Innocence, and Experience, written concurrently, which have the same basic project of perceiving the objects and entities of the world under this schizoid eye. These were the only poems of Blake I had read until I read this book, and for a while I had felt Blake quite over-rated, particularly because these poems are often, taken by themselves, trivial and mundane, and seem mostly attractive for their baby-like ballad rhythms (at which I do not feel Blake is particularly expert; a brute 2/4 prosodic rhythm is often smotheringly common, and he is painfully inconsistent at using head syllables which make the rhymes almost impossible to read fluently without memorizing the poem). The best of these poems, like London or the Tyger, succeed by merit of marrying an individually interesting poetic elenchus to the schizophrenic hysteria Blake sees in all nature, which make these short poems thin and innocent veneers over a barely-concealed apocalyptic breakdown.
Ultimately, and perhaps unfortunately, Blake is at root an esoteric writer, like Plato or Yeats, whose writings are informed by an underlying and obscure world-view not immediately given to the reader and by which context the poems are truly meaningful. His prose writings are not particularly helpful, but the prophetic books amount to something resembling an explanation of how Blake saw the world: from the Marriage of Heaven and Hell we can see one of Blake's main preoccupations, namely, his feeling that it is arbitrary and false to privelege the rational/legalistic nature of the divine over the material/desiderative; that is to say, he feels traditional Christian dualism between the mind and the body is misleading, since both are instantiate things and therefore subordinate to the truly divine. The inferiority of Satan's rule of material things, therefore, is merely a claim postulated by the angels enacting the legal rule of the rational domain, and a wrong road for those seeking the truth. Blake, however, is not of the gnostic sect that took this claim to suggest that wanton crime was true Christian praxis, but rather seems to ally himself fundamentally with the soul and its most important, as Blake feels it, capacity: the imagination. Blind indulgence in both rational matters (for Blake, the overly complex theological arguments of Swedenborg) and carnal matters.
Some of the prophetic books deal with this problem from a naturalistic perspective, or narrating the creation of this metaphysical dynamic through tales of theogony, but Blake seems to have been more interested in its application to man, particularly in his current epoch. It seems to me that Blake made the (very wise) identification between man's embrace of the desiderative and political liberalism, and regarded this identification as at once profound but ultimately a mistake. In the prophetic poem America, Blake depicts the (then recent) founders of America as naive heroes having liberated human desire from traditional bounds of structural control (eg, European monarchy) but, in so doing, initiated the destruction of all order, both social and metaphysical. The longer epic poems, like Four Zoas and Jerusalem, chronicle this total eschaton in hysteric (and mostly incoherent) detail, amounting to an end to rationality, the possibility of law, and all natural and physical things, which was to be followed (as some letters and prose writings indicate more clearly) by an ineffable reunification of all beings in heaven, or something else transcendentally mysterious in that manner.
Blake's main feeling about liberalism across these poems is less that it is good or wise for initiating this type of eschaton, but rather that it goes wrong in attempting to rationalize it, and I think he may indicate in some of his other epic poems, like Europe or The Daughters of Albion, that the example set by America and the French Revolution are not the actual arbiters of the apocalypse, but rather a sign post meant to inspire the proper gnosis, supposedly to take place in England (leaving it to them, I suppose, is why I'm still physico-rationally instantiate to write this review) by those of proper imagination. For Blake, the correct praxis to take from this understanding of the material - rational dyad is to radically accept the noblest and purest emotions in man, namely aesthetic imagination and personal love, and to reject the impure manifestations of either (verbose intellectualism, myopic greed). It's said that Blake was mostly an isolated and obscure person, who did little but paint and have sex with his wife (and maybe others, given that his theories led him to conclude polyamory was what God intended for man), so, in effect, these esoteric eschatological theories amount to a justification of the two main activities Blake did for most of his life.
These theories are interesting, and perhaps applicable to a wide variety of situations, but their abstract and willfully irrational character make their presentation in these poems rather difficult to think about beyond marvelling at how Blake utilises them for poetic purposes. I had mentioned above the rabid, intense effect his poetic project lends to his simple ballad writings, and his prophetic books are overflowing with non-stop, machine gun images in fourteener after fourteener, tens of thousands of which he seems to have written in hallucinatory binges. They are, then, almost incredibly rich and flowing, lacking obvious hack-marks of repetitions and cliches (beyond his fixations) and make for incredibly rich reading. I think, perhaps, my main regret is that I had a simple text book, and not an art book with the paintings and etchings which he produced to accompany these poems.
In all, this book, or some other book containing these poems, are absolutely worth reading. I also really do like these Portable editions, perhaps alone for their binding: my copy is almost seventy years old, and still holds together beautiful with solid, ergonomically delightful droopy pages.
March 20, 2012
Early on I thought Blake easily passed the test for a poet that is worth an entire book. That being, not only was I taken with the famous poems, but ones I'd never heard of before such as "Soft Snow." Blake really does have a unique voice with rich rewards for the reader at times and such a complicated world-view peeking even through such familiar poems as "The Lamb" in Songs of Innocence and "London," "A Poison Tree" and "Tyger! Tyger!" in Songs of Experience. In "Tyger" he asks how God could make the lamb and yet the tiger, I thought Blake was just as paradoxical in his own creations. The introduction by Alfred Kazin makes Blake sound like a paradox--even mad. Kazin described Blake as a "libertarian" who supported revolution and hated any restraints upon liberty and loathed dogma. Yet he was also deeply anti-reason, a man who'd rant against any who'd try to prove the Earth isn't flat, let alone the likes of Newton. His vision of the world is sui generis and that meant at times I felt disoriented reading his poetry, as if I was missing reference points only he recognized--even the very thorough introduction didn't always help. Some poems were just too deeply weird. See, for instance, "The Mental Travelled."
I hit a wall with The Prophetic Books, including his purported masterpiece "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." I find the later Blake the most impenetrable writer I've read save James Joyce. Even C.S. Lewis, in the preface to The Great Divorce inspired by the poem, said he wasn't sure what Blake meant. Reading this I think it was only because Blake was so anti-social that he didn't found his own religion. And really, a man that rants not just against Bacon, Newton and Locke but Homer, Virgil and Shakespeare? We can't be friends.
I hit a wall with The Prophetic Books, including his purported masterpiece "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." I find the later Blake the most impenetrable writer I've read save James Joyce. Even C.S. Lewis, in the preface to The Great Divorce inspired by the poem, said he wasn't sure what Blake meant. Reading this I think it was only because Blake was so anti-social that he didn't found his own religion. And really, a man that rants not just against Bacon, Newton and Locke but Homer, Virgil and Shakespeare? We can't be friends.
April 5, 2011
This has additions. Better collection than other editions on my shelf.
The wild winds weep,
And the night is a-cold;
Come hither, Sleep,
And my griefs enfold! . . .
But lo! the morning peeps
Over the eastern steeps,
And the rustling beds of dawn
The earth do scorn.
Lo! to the vault
Of pavèd heaven,
With sorrow fraught,
My notes are driven:
They strike the ear of Night,
Make weak the eyes of Day;
They make mad the roaring winds,
And with the tempests play,
Like a fiend in a cloud,
With howling woe
After night I do crowd
And with night will go;
I turn my back to the east
From whence comforts have increased;
For light doth seize my brain
With frantic pain.
The wild winds weep,
And the night is a-cold;
Come hither, Sleep,
And my griefs enfold! . . .
But lo! the morning peeps
Over the eastern steeps,
And the rustling beds of dawn
The earth do scorn.
Lo! to the vault
Of pavèd heaven,
With sorrow fraught,
My notes are driven:
They strike the ear of Night,
Make weak the eyes of Day;
They make mad the roaring winds,
And with the tempests play,
Like a fiend in a cloud,
With howling woe
After night I do crowd
And with night will go;
I turn my back to the east
From whence comforts have increased;
For light doth seize my brain
With frantic pain.
August 7, 2022
Still a good intro to Blake, with a very good introduction, by Alfred Kazin, the editor.
I don't know of any other English writer whose reputation (a mistaken one, based on the belief he was a mystic) is such a problem. How is something like this "mystic"? It isn't, not remotely.
The Mental Traveller
I travelled through a land of men,
A land of men and women too,
And heard and saw such dreadful things
As cold earth wanderers never knew.
For there the babe is born in joy
That was begotten in dire woe,
Just as we reap in joy the fruit
Which we in bitter tears did sow;
And if the babe is born a boy
He’s given to a woman old,
Who nails him down upon a rock,
Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.
She binds iron thorns around his head,
And pierces both his hands and feet,
And cuts his heart out of his side
To make it feel both cold & heat.
Her fingers number every nerve
Just as a miser counts his gold;
She lives upon his shrieks and cries—
And she grows young as he grows old,
Till he becomes a bleeding youth
And she becomes a virgin bright;
Then he rends up his manacles
And pins her down for his delight.
He plants himself in all her nerves
Just as a husbandman his mould,
And she becomes his dwelling-place
And garden, frutiful seventyfold.
An aged shadow soon he fades,
Wandering round and earthly cot,
Full filled all with gems and gold
Which he by industry had got.
And these are the gems of the human soul:
The rubies and pearls of a lovesick eye,
The countless gold of an aching heart,
The martyr’s groan, and the lover’s sigh.
They are his meat, they are his drink:
He feeds the beggar and the poor
And the wayfaring traveller;
For ever open is his door.
His grief is their eternal joy,
They make the roofs and walls to ring—
Till from the fire on the hearth
Alittle female babe does spring!
And she is all of solid fire
And gems and gold, that none his hand
Dares stretch to touch her baby form,
Or wrap her in his swaddling-band.
But she comes to the man she loves,
If young or old, or rich or poor;
They soon drive out the aged host,
A beggar at another’s door.
He wanders weeping far away
Until some other take him in;
Oft blind and age-bent, sore distressed,
Until he can a maiden win.
And to allay his freezing age
The poor man takes her in his arms:
The cottage fades before his sight,
The garden and its lovely charms;
The guests are scattered through the land
(For the eye altering, alters all);
The senses roll themselves in fear,
And the flat earth becomes a ball,
The stars, sun, moon, all shrink away—
A desert vast without a bound,
And nothing left to eat or drink
And a dark desert all around.
The honey of her infant lips,
The bread and wine of her sweet smile,
The wild game of her roving eye
Does him to infancy beguile.
For as he eats and drinks he grows
Younger and younger every day;
And on the desert wild they both
Wander in terror and dismay.
Like the wild stag she flees away;
Her fear plants many a thicket wild,
While he pursues her night and day,
By various arts of love beguiled.
By various arts of love and hate,
Till the wide desert planted o’er
With labyrinths of wayward love,
Where roams the lion, wolf and boar,
Till he becomes a wayward babe
And she a weeping woman old.
Then many a lover wanders here,
The sun and stars are nearer rolled,
The trees bring forth sweet ecstasy
To all who in the desert roam,
Till many a city there is built,
And many a pleasant shepherd’s home.
But when they find the frowning babe
Terror strikes through the region wide;
They cry, ‘The Babe! the Babe is born!’
And flee away on every side.
For who dare touch the frowning form
His arm is withered to its root,
Lions, boars, wolves, all howling flee
And every tree does shed its fruit;
And none can touch that frowning form,
Except it be a woman old;
She nails him down upon the rock,
And all is done as I have told.
To encounter Blake first hand is to be overwhelmed by the complexity of his mythology, one that is designed to emphasize the belief that liberty is not transcendence at all, but something far different. He's a challenge, a real climb. He's also still of great relevance, particularly at a point in time where liberty for the addled modern has something to do with consumerism and other echo chambers of a profound, irritable boredom. It's probably why so many turn off on first encounter, they expect vague, cloudy mystical sentiments while what they encounter is steely, precise, outraged at the times and utterly unique.
I've read Blake for ages, and I still can't say that I'm really up to speed with what he is doing most of the time, but he really was sui generis and in a way that isn't remotely of the ether. Weird as it sounds where was his mind? Where do these strange symbolic epics takes place? The answer is right here, right now.
I don't know of any other English writer whose reputation (a mistaken one, based on the belief he was a mystic) is such a problem. How is something like this "mystic"? It isn't, not remotely.
The Mental Traveller
I travelled through a land of men,
A land of men and women too,
And heard and saw such dreadful things
As cold earth wanderers never knew.
For there the babe is born in joy
That was begotten in dire woe,
Just as we reap in joy the fruit
Which we in bitter tears did sow;
And if the babe is born a boy
He’s given to a woman old,
Who nails him down upon a rock,
Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.
She binds iron thorns around his head,
And pierces both his hands and feet,
And cuts his heart out of his side
To make it feel both cold & heat.
Her fingers number every nerve
Just as a miser counts his gold;
She lives upon his shrieks and cries—
And she grows young as he grows old,
Till he becomes a bleeding youth
And she becomes a virgin bright;
Then he rends up his manacles
And pins her down for his delight.
He plants himself in all her nerves
Just as a husbandman his mould,
And she becomes his dwelling-place
And garden, frutiful seventyfold.
An aged shadow soon he fades,
Wandering round and earthly cot,
Full filled all with gems and gold
Which he by industry had got.
And these are the gems of the human soul:
The rubies and pearls of a lovesick eye,
The countless gold of an aching heart,
The martyr’s groan, and the lover’s sigh.
They are his meat, they are his drink:
He feeds the beggar and the poor
And the wayfaring traveller;
For ever open is his door.
His grief is their eternal joy,
They make the roofs and walls to ring—
Till from the fire on the hearth
Alittle female babe does spring!
And she is all of solid fire
And gems and gold, that none his hand
Dares stretch to touch her baby form,
Or wrap her in his swaddling-band.
But she comes to the man she loves,
If young or old, or rich or poor;
They soon drive out the aged host,
A beggar at another’s door.
He wanders weeping far away
Until some other take him in;
Oft blind and age-bent, sore distressed,
Until he can a maiden win.
And to allay his freezing age
The poor man takes her in his arms:
The cottage fades before his sight,
The garden and its lovely charms;
The guests are scattered through the land
(For the eye altering, alters all);
The senses roll themselves in fear,
And the flat earth becomes a ball,
The stars, sun, moon, all shrink away—
A desert vast without a bound,
And nothing left to eat or drink
And a dark desert all around.
The honey of her infant lips,
The bread and wine of her sweet smile,
The wild game of her roving eye
Does him to infancy beguile.
For as he eats and drinks he grows
Younger and younger every day;
And on the desert wild they both
Wander in terror and dismay.
Like the wild stag she flees away;
Her fear plants many a thicket wild,
While he pursues her night and day,
By various arts of love beguiled.
By various arts of love and hate,
Till the wide desert planted o’er
With labyrinths of wayward love,
Where roams the lion, wolf and boar,
Till he becomes a wayward babe
And she a weeping woman old.
Then many a lover wanders here,
The sun and stars are nearer rolled,
The trees bring forth sweet ecstasy
To all who in the desert roam,
Till many a city there is built,
And many a pleasant shepherd’s home.
But when they find the frowning babe
Terror strikes through the region wide;
They cry, ‘The Babe! the Babe is born!’
And flee away on every side.
For who dare touch the frowning form
His arm is withered to its root,
Lions, boars, wolves, all howling flee
And every tree does shed its fruit;
And none can touch that frowning form,
Except it be a woman old;
She nails him down upon the rock,
And all is done as I have told.
To encounter Blake first hand is to be overwhelmed by the complexity of his mythology, one that is designed to emphasize the belief that liberty is not transcendence at all, but something far different. He's a challenge, a real climb. He's also still of great relevance, particularly at a point in time where liberty for the addled modern has something to do with consumerism and other echo chambers of a profound, irritable boredom. It's probably why so many turn off on first encounter, they expect vague, cloudy mystical sentiments while what they encounter is steely, precise, outraged at the times and utterly unique.
I've read Blake for ages, and I still can't say that I'm really up to speed with what he is doing most of the time, but he really was sui generis and in a way that isn't remotely of the ether. Weird as it sounds where was his mind? Where do these strange symbolic epics takes place? The answer is right here, right now.
Read
July 10, 2010From 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'
'The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
'Isaiah answer'd: 'I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in everything, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.'
'Then I asked: 'Does firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?'
'He replied: 'All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing.'' (Kindle ebook locations 2809-19)
From 'There is No Natural Religion' [Religion as defined by Deism:]
'The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round, even of a universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels...
'If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.
'The desire of Man being Infinite, the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite.
'He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio [rationality and naturalism:] only, sees himself only.
'Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.' (Kindle ebook locations 978-987)
From the 1946 Introduction by Alfred Kazin:
'... Blake has perplexed his readers even more than he has delighted them. The reason lies in his refusal to concede a distance between what is real and what is ideal.... Blake is difficult not because he invented symbols of his own; he created his symbols to show that the existence of any natural object and the value man's mind places on it were one and the same. He was fighting the acceptance of reality in the light of science as much as he was fighting the suppression of human nature by ethical dogmas. He fought on two fronts, and shifted his arms from one to the other without letting us know - more exactly, he did not let himself know. He created for himself a personality, in life and in art, that was the image of the thing he sought.
'Like all the great enlighteners of the eighteenth century, Blake is againt the ancien regime, in all its manifestations - autocracy, feudalism, superstition. Though he loathed the destructive reason of the Deists, he sometimes praised it in the fight against 'holy mystery.' He was fighting for free thought.' (Kindle ereader locations 395-404)
This, of course, is the sort of book you never "finish" reading.
'The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
'Isaiah answer'd: 'I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in everything, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.'
'Then I asked: 'Does firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?'
'He replied: 'All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing.'' (Kindle ebook locations 2809-19)
From 'There is No Natural Religion' [Religion as defined by Deism:]
'The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round, even of a universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels...
'If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.
'The desire of Man being Infinite, the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite.
'He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio [rationality and naturalism:] only, sees himself only.
'Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.' (Kindle ebook locations 978-987)
From the 1946 Introduction by Alfred Kazin:
'... Blake has perplexed his readers even more than he has delighted them. The reason lies in his refusal to concede a distance between what is real and what is ideal.... Blake is difficult not because he invented symbols of his own; he created his symbols to show that the existence of any natural object and the value man's mind places on it were one and the same. He was fighting the acceptance of reality in the light of science as much as he was fighting the suppression of human nature by ethical dogmas. He fought on two fronts, and shifted his arms from one to the other without letting us know - more exactly, he did not let himself know. He created for himself a personality, in life and in art, that was the image of the thing he sought.
'Like all the great enlighteners of the eighteenth century, Blake is againt the ancien regime, in all its manifestations - autocracy, feudalism, superstition. Though he loathed the destructive reason of the Deists, he sometimes praised it in the fight against 'holy mystery.' He was fighting for free thought.' (Kindle ereader locations 395-404)
This, of course, is the sort of book you never "finish" reading.
Currently reading
March 26, 2024---Notes---
p2. "[Blake] was entirely preoccupied with ... the burden ... of the finiteness of man before the whole creation."
p6. "He hated scientific investigation. He could say ... that he believed the world is flat. He was undoubtedly sincere, but he did not really care what shape it was; he would not have believed any evidence whatsoever that there were many planets and universes. He did not believe in God..."
Ich auch!
p8. "For Blake accepts nothing ... Blake begins with a longing so deep, for all that is invisible and infinite to man under the dominion of God, matter, and reason, that he tears away the shell of earth, the prison of man in his own senses, to assert that there is nothing but man and that man is nothing but the highest flights of his own imagination ... Blake is seeking something which is analogous to mysticism, but he is not in any ordinary sense a mystic. He is very much in the stream of thought which led to naturalism, but he is not a naturalist."
p10. "Blake has the mystic's tormented sense of the doubleness of life between reality and the ideal. But he tries to resolve it on earth, in the living person of man... Blake is against everything that submits, mortifies, constricts and denies."
Resolve it on earth!
p10. "He denies that man is born with any innate sense of morality ... and thinks education a training in conformity."
p13. "His own place in the poem is that of the walker in the modern inhuman city, one isolated man in the net which men have created.... For him man is always the wanderer in the oppressive and sterile world of materialism which only his imagination and love can render human."
p16. "Vision is his master-word, not mysticism or soul. For vision represents the total imagination of man made tangible and direct in works of art."
p18. "To him all the arts were simultaneously necessary, in their highest creative use and inner proportion, to give us the ground essence of his vision and a stimulus to our own."
p21. "Naturalism is a great and tragic way of looking at life, for with every advance in man's consciousness and in his ability to ascertain, to predict, and to control, he loses that view of his supreme importance which is at the center of religious myth... It is tragic, for by showing that man's experience is limited it gives him a sense of his permanent and unremitting struggle in a world he did not make... The quality of tragedy is not sadness but grave exhilaration; it defines the possible. Blake is not a naturalist... He does not believe that anything is finally real except the imagination of man... "how do I know that anything is real, since I know of reality only through my own mind?" - and pronounced that the problem was settled. He refused to believe the evidence of his senses that the human mind... is bombarded by something outside itself. We are eternally subjective; but there are objects... he was not trying to prove anything philosophical at all; his greatness depends not on his conception of the world but on what he created through it... he imagined a world equal to his heart's desire. He refused to admit objective reality only because he was afraid man would have to share the creation."
p23. "...his refusal to concede a distance between what is real and what is idea; in his desperate need to claim them as one."
Isn't that precisely me?
p24. "Blake... was concerned with the freedom of man from all restrictions - whether imposed by the morality of the Church or the narrowness of positivism."
...and of sciences! c.f. p27 "The impassioned rejection of all that is analytical and self-limiting in modern thought is central to Blake."
p25. "For life is holy. Energy is eternal delight... Joy is the only redemption and all suppression is a little death."
c.f. your own vision last year - experience is joy and any dimensionality reduction of the plethora of simultaneous experiences is a little death
p29. "He was a genius who from childhood on felt in himself such absolute personal gifts that, anticipating the devaluation of them by a materialistic society, made sure that society's values did not exist for him"
c.f. Levé, "You thought that treatment would normalize you, or banalize the strangeness you cultivated."
p40. "Innocence is belief and experience is doubt. The tragedy of experience is that we become incapable of love. The tragedy of childhood is that we inflict our lovelessness upon it."
p41. "The grief of the child is also the loneliness of the soul in its sudden prison of earth."
How tf did I manage to not know Blake in the first 30 years of my life???
p2. "[Blake] was entirely preoccupied with ... the burden ... of the finiteness of man before the whole creation."
p6. "He hated scientific investigation. He could say ... that he believed the world is flat. He was undoubtedly sincere, but he did not really care what shape it was; he would not have believed any evidence whatsoever that there were many planets and universes. He did not believe in God..."
Ich auch!
p8. "For Blake accepts nothing ... Blake begins with a longing so deep, for all that is invisible and infinite to man under the dominion of God, matter, and reason, that he tears away the shell of earth, the prison of man in his own senses, to assert that there is nothing but man and that man is nothing but the highest flights of his own imagination ... Blake is seeking something which is analogous to mysticism, but he is not in any ordinary sense a mystic. He is very much in the stream of thought which led to naturalism, but he is not a naturalist."
p10. "Blake has the mystic's tormented sense of the doubleness of life between reality and the ideal. But he tries to resolve it on earth, in the living person of man... Blake is against everything that submits, mortifies, constricts and denies."
Resolve it on earth!
p10. "He denies that man is born with any innate sense of morality ... and thinks education a training in conformity."
p13. "His own place in the poem is that of the walker in the modern inhuman city, one isolated man in the net which men have created.... For him man is always the wanderer in the oppressive and sterile world of materialism which only his imagination and love can render human."
p16. "Vision is his master-word, not mysticism or soul. For vision represents the total imagination of man made tangible and direct in works of art."
p18. "To him all the arts were simultaneously necessary, in their highest creative use and inner proportion, to give us the ground essence of his vision and a stimulus to our own."
p21. "Naturalism is a great and tragic way of looking at life, for with every advance in man's consciousness and in his ability to ascertain, to predict, and to control, he loses that view of his supreme importance which is at the center of religious myth... It is tragic, for by showing that man's experience is limited it gives him a sense of his permanent and unremitting struggle in a world he did not make... The quality of tragedy is not sadness but grave exhilaration; it defines the possible. Blake is not a naturalist... He does not believe that anything is finally real except the imagination of man... "how do I know that anything is real, since I know of reality only through my own mind?" - and pronounced that the problem was settled. He refused to believe the evidence of his senses that the human mind... is bombarded by something outside itself. We are eternally subjective; but there are objects... he was not trying to prove anything philosophical at all; his greatness depends not on his conception of the world but on what he created through it... he imagined a world equal to his heart's desire. He refused to admit objective reality only because he was afraid man would have to share the creation."
p23. "...his refusal to concede a distance between what is real and what is idea; in his desperate need to claim them as one."
Isn't that precisely me?
p24. "Blake... was concerned with the freedom of man from all restrictions - whether imposed by the morality of the Church or the narrowness of positivism."
...and of sciences! c.f. p27 "The impassioned rejection of all that is analytical and self-limiting in modern thought is central to Blake."
p25. "For life is holy. Energy is eternal delight... Joy is the only redemption and all suppression is a little death."
c.f. your own vision last year - experience is joy and any dimensionality reduction of the plethora of simultaneous experiences is a little death
p29. "He was a genius who from childhood on felt in himself such absolute personal gifts that, anticipating the devaluation of them by a materialistic society, made sure that society's values did not exist for him"
c.f. Levé, "You thought that treatment would normalize you, or banalize the strangeness you cultivated."
p40. "Innocence is belief and experience is doubt. The tragedy of experience is that we become incapable of love. The tragedy of childhood is that we inflict our lovelessness upon it."
p41. "The grief of the child is also the loneliness of the soul in its sudden prison of earth."
How tf did I manage to not know Blake in the first 30 years of my life???
November 28, 2017
Fantastic. his prophetic books should be animated.
June 20, 2022
Good I really love his early works but honestly didn’t read his mythology books they’re a bit too heavy for me 😬
November 29, 2025
changed my life!
September 27, 2016
Seven hundred pages is a whole lot of Blake and more than most people probably need. It's an editorial decision that all the books in "The Viking Portable Library" should be around 700 pages, but maybe they could have had a few less for this guy.
The first fifty or so pages are an excellent introduction. The more accessible works run about hundred pages or so... the Songs of Innocence and Experience and some other "verses and fragments," also his letters where Blake is maybe trying extra hard to sound like someone from this planet. But most of the book is very difficult. I think the excerpts from "The Prophetic Books" would have benefited from some explanatory footnotes. The only illustrations in here are black and white pages from "The Book of Job" and I think it would have been better to maybe have less text and some more of the illustrations. I'd like to think that would have made some of the text more understandable. At the end is an appendix, relevant excerpts from Crabb Robinson's Reminiscences, and it's a humdinger. Blake's intensity and his relationship to his own visions is lovingly described. Almost makes me sweat.
Blake's nutty religious views are not my own, but I dig the poetry and the whole outsider artist thing he's got going, and his ideas on morality are something to think about.
The first fifty or so pages are an excellent introduction. The more accessible works run about hundred pages or so... the Songs of Innocence and Experience and some other "verses and fragments," also his letters where Blake is maybe trying extra hard to sound like someone from this planet. But most of the book is very difficult. I think the excerpts from "The Prophetic Books" would have benefited from some explanatory footnotes. The only illustrations in here are black and white pages from "The Book of Job" and I think it would have been better to maybe have less text and some more of the illustrations. I'd like to think that would have made some of the text more understandable. At the end is an appendix, relevant excerpts from Crabb Robinson's Reminiscences, and it's a humdinger. Blake's intensity and his relationship to his own visions is lovingly described. Almost makes me sweat.
Blake's nutty religious views are not my own, but I dig the poetry and the whole outsider artist thing he's got going, and his ideas on morality are something to think about.
July 3, 2007
Good stuff. He's a little out there, and reasonably mysterious, but it's good. I like the imagery, that's the best part of Blake's poetry. Also, his ideas on thoughts on humanity. It's not romantic or sublime though, not the best poetry I've read, but solid nonetheless. The best poetry is when someone is able to accurately reflect feelings through words and phrases. Blake is more of a myth maker and religous poet, a lot of metaphor and meaning, not enough feeling for me.
April 30, 2014
I'm counting this as completed even though I didn't read it cover to cover. I read all of "Young Blake," "The Prophetic Books," and pieces of "Art, Money, and the Age," and "The Old Blake."
It's great to actually read so much of the work that inspired the decadence, passion, and excess of poets like Ginsberg that came later.
I'm sure I'll revisit the other pieces later, Blake is fascinating, but nothing but Blake for over 700 pages is a little much for me.
It's great to actually read so much of the work that inspired the decadence, passion, and excess of poets like Ginsberg that came later.
I'm sure I'll revisit the other pieces later, Blake is fascinating, but nothing but Blake for over 700 pages is a little much for me.
March 26, 2017
I first read Blake in my early twenties, confused, mesmerized and, finally, in awe of the sheer brilliance of both his writings and his art. His early poems have stayed with me ever since, though I always shied away from his later, complex works as "Milton" and "Jerusalem." It is worth buying this book not only for the selection of Blake's work, but for the magnificent 55 page Introduction by Alfred Kazin that is an essay of respect and deep understanding.
Want to read
October 26, 2007I've only scratched the surface of William Blake's writing, and I visited the William Blake exhibit at the U of U's Museum of Modern Art and was blown away. As soon as I clear up a little reading time... we'll say sometime in the coming century, I'm gonna read the hell out of this book. Because he writes about hell, see... It's a funny joke. It is!
June 29, 2016
So this guy wrote maybe three good poems, and they have a 700+ page book of his collected works? What a whiner. Half his poems are just complaining because he can't get laid. Helloooo! Maybe girls like poets whose poetry scans? Even his best (most famous?) poem "The Tiger" can't decide if it's iambic or trochaic tetrameter.
March 29, 2016
Was Blake a visionary or just a whacko? It really doesn't matter because his impassioned poems underscore his claim that "without contraries there can be no progress." Blake insists that we look at both sides of the story -- even when it's unpleasant. Try to get a look at the beautiful watercolors Blake made to go with virtually all of his poems.
April 7, 2016
William Blake is one of the poets that has most influenced the Mytho-poetic movement to which I consider myself to be a member. He is very famous for his: Proverbs from Hell. His poetry, his ideas and his vision are driven by what we now know as: "Crazy Wisdom." A must read for anybody who like to think "Outside the Box" and who is willing to go beyond ...!
January 24, 2016
This book is really interesting. Blake must have been quite a character when he was alive. Hmm. Anyway, along with his poetry and selections from his "Prophetic Books," it also contains a short biography and some other interesting tidbits of information.
March 13, 2016
I don't know if I fully appreciated the depth of Blake's poems when I read them in college. I'd like to reread them sometime and become re-aquainted. Philosophy, religion, allegory....his poems pretty much have it all.
April 18, 2007
I love this book, not only for Blake's poems, but for the strikingly beautiful artwork that accompanies particular poems. He did them himself. Must have.
March 27, 2008
I don't get it but Blake is awesome.
August 17, 2008
Like so many of my books, this one is a "currently-reading" -- I can't claim to understand Blake, but admiration is 9/10s of ownership. Or valor. Or the law.
You pick.
You pick.
April 23, 2009
Like Poe, I cannot imagine my life without William Blake. I love his writings, they speak to your soul. I love them enough to have had "Eternity" tattooed on my back... 'nuff said.
June 11, 2009
love.
August 3, 2010
It fun trying to figure out William Blake.
September 22, 2012
Some good stuff in here, but mostly the verse. His "Prophetic Books" and essays a bit too dense for my tastes.
February 27, 2014
Like all loved poetry, one never really finishes reading it.
June 20, 2013
My go-to book whenever I want to look up a Blake quote or just want to read a few stanzas of his poetry. One of my all-time favorites...
December 28, 2019
Fantastic edition!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews