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massive critical work on Blake's 'The Four Zoas' ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

frye and beyond
Some time ago I reread Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry before having another read through of the poems of William Blake including the longer poems The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. Despite my appreciation of Frye's book I was struck by the disconnect between many of Frye's well-expressed and coherent ideas and the poems themselves. I noticed also that Frye barely quoted from any of the poems or analyzed any passage specifically. At that point I started to look around for other texts which offered a different viewpoint from Frye to see if my dissatisfaction was justified or not. The more I read the alternative views the more convinced I became that Frye's account was seriously deficient. I do not think he is entirely wrong or that there is nothing of value in his book. However, I strongly recommend that readers interested in Blake's poetry read alternative views. The ones I have found most useful and interesting include the current book listed here as well as the following:The Four Zoas (Photographic Facsimile (Magno & Erdman), Narrative Unbound (Donald Ault),The Dialectic of Vision (Fred Dortort),Dark Figures in the Desired Country (Gerda Norvig),The Traveler in the Evening (Morton Paley), Rethinking Blake's Textuality (Molly Rothenburg),and some of the articles in Blake's Sublime Allegory (Curran & Wittreich Eds.) I might note that after doing all this reading of the poems and about Blake I am convinced that the unpublished The Four Zoas is the central and most significant poem Blake wrote and that both Milton and Jerusalem suffer in comparison with it. The problem that Blake may have realized with the Four Zoas was that it could never be published in its authentic form due to the graphic (for the time) psychosexual content of the illustrations (the subtitle of the poem is The Torments of Love and Jealousy).

Donald Ault / Donald Duck / WIlliam Blake
Donald Ault is an inspiring and unique mind.No boundaries, for they are always re-examined, as he does here with a response and re-thinking of his own arguments towards William Blake and his responses to the Newtonian Universe.Donald Ault is a mind stretched as it should be--lobes in literature, lobes in Disney, lobes in Coca-Cola.His books do not yet show his utter vastness, but I hope one day his thoughts on Donald Duck will come to the bibliography. ... Read more

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William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience," combined in this little volume, are both filled with amazing poetry. In "Songs of Innocence," Blake reveals the true innocent and peaceful ways of a person's childhood. While most people remember William Blake for "Tyger, tyger, burning bright" and "Little Lamb, who made thee?" his other poems are wonderful as well. The point of the poems doesn't seem to be that aging brings experience, but that experience changes innocence, to some degree. For instance, the "Chimney Sweep" is about children who work as chimney sweeps but dream of heaven. Many of the poems have symbolic and religious meanings. The imagery is beautiful and poignant. One of William Blake's most famous poems, "The Lamb," tells the story of a young boy asking an innocent lamb, "Who made thee?" "The Lamb" is religious and very pleasant to read. "Songs of Experience" is a book filled with deceitful and cruel poems. The book's poems are based on the hardships of the "real" world. "The Tyger," a famous poem from "Songs of Experience," is a contrary poem to "The Lamb." Though "The Tyger" speaks of God the Creator of all things, the poem has a dark theme and setting unlike "The Lamb." William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience" are two enjoyable works to read, highly recommended for anyone who appreciates meaning and depth in poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Not for the tone deaf
To begin with, it can be helpful to distinguish between "aesthetic" worldly poets/musicians and "vatic"/prophetic artists.Keats and Shakespeare, Ellington and Bill Evans belong in the first category; Shelley and Milton (and, of course, Dante) along with John Coltrane and Sun Ra belong in the second.

Blake is the foremost representative of the latter group--the bards (Milton was his hero; America's Ezra Pound his foremost descendant).Of all the so-called "Romantic" poets, he is in many respects the most atypical.Time, its passing, its presence as "personal memory," specific referents to particular places, the fleshing-out of human figures, whether upper or lower class--all this is of little interest to the visionary prophet written off as "crazy" during his life-time, eventually canonized by the Beatniks in the 1950s, and finally admitted to respectable academia.Earthly phenomena are of little interest to him because, frankly, they have no status in reality.I deliberately steer students away from his graphic art, because its symbolic nature is poorly understood by a generation brought up on images that glorify the material world (if the emphasis isn't on the "real," it's on the surreal or "hyper-real"--but the real with which today's readers identify is anything but the spiritual cosmos that Blake finds everywhere, whether a tiger or a grain of sand.(Pity his wife, who understandably had little patience with him.) More often than not, Blake's pictures nowadays detract from, rather than support, the poetry.When Blake said, "the eye can see more than the heart can know," he envisioned a human potential which few are able to realize--the sort of epiphany granted to the prophet who, after a lifetime of struggle, sees the New Jerusalem or, like Dante, the Godhead itself (the spinning wheel at the end of The Paradiso).

Blake's poetry, in both the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, is music that, even when tranquil and serene on the surface, is never resolved in its minor modalities and dissonant counter-themes.In the second set of poems, that verbal music rises to a deafening fortissimo in the poem "London," in which the speaker, above all, "hears" in every cry--from the infant's to the prostitute's to the numerous thralls of the church, state and crown--a threnody of pain and suffering that climaxes in an uproar of righteous anger and indignation at the horrible realization of the consequences of"mind-forged manacles" upon the world and its inhabitants.But even in the poems from the early collection, the tone is characterized by ever-present irony--the disjuncture between the voice of the innocent child and that of the poet who knows all too well what is in store, or the disparity between the trusting faith of the child and the selfish scenarios of the "wise" keepers--the grey-haired beadles--who will violate that trust with their well-laid plans.Blake's message is unceasingly twofold--first, a testament to the holy birthright of the human child and, second, withering criticism of the "rational engines" of society that will act to estrange the child from the Father, from the Son, from its own spiritual identity.

Each of the poems may be read simply, but make no mistake about it: each is ironic and complex, inexhaustibly so.The reader must, with each passing word, be attuned, above all, to irony, ambiguity, and radical shifts in tone--or risk inflicting upon the poet the same distortions the poet finds in human society.The "enemy" is not the "Tiger" which, like the Lamb, is merely evidence of Divine Mystery and Power--but of another order.For Blake, the Lamb, the Tiger, the babe--and a poisonous reptile or virus--are created by God and are equally holy.And now the true antagonist makes its appearance: human reason and its institutions--climaxing in the state-sanctioned marriage of children and parents to the "bridegroom" of organized government and religion.

It can be discouraging to read these poems with students and discover, practically without fail, that a large majority will misinterpret them, frequently coming to conclusions opposite to the evidence of the poems individually as well as collectively. The reasons are at least three-fold: fast and careless readings of short poems that often require (and deserve) the amount of time devoted to a novel; imposition of one's own belief system (or instilled principles and conventional aphorisms); the sheer challenge offered by Blake's "radical" ideas and their deceptive expression.

Those who are serious about poetry and Blake will no doubt soon infer his "message": we must see not with the eye of reason, which measures and "charters" the flowing Thames as readily as it maps out the dehumanizing streets of London, but with the imagination, with the symbolic faculty that enables us to see the underlying spiritual basis of all material reality and thus to empathize with all living things and to live in harmony only with what is alive and vital.Blake is the first thinker I'm familiar with who puts the child first and foremost--and not until the early 19th century.For the Age of Enlightenment (The Age of Reason), children simply don't count.They have no individualism, no identity, no status in art and literature.In his own time, children were little more than the utilitarian objects of the Church-State, deployed to sweep chimneys, then disposed of.The dying chimney sweep of the first "Chimney Sweeper" poem (how regrettable that many readers do not even understand that little Tommy Dacer's "awakening" at the end of the poem is possible only because of his "murder" by the church) is, in the 2nd poem of the same title, a dead child, whose excoriating criticism includes his parents but is leveled primarily at the church.Some readers dismiss the second poem because it doesn't make sense to have a dead child lying in the snow and speaking--it's not rational.

But that's to place ourselves at the mercy of the poems' judgments--as misguided tools of Reason, deaf to the harmonious world and the discordant society around us.If it helps to postpone taking on some of the more difficult poems in either collection, fine.But each poem, each ironic line and musical phrase, each word and note of sorrow or joy is integral with the whole, each part absolutely and completely consistent with the overall theme, meaning and purpose.Seeing with the imagination requires practice and patience: reclaiming one's inner child (Wordsworth's "child-philosopher" who, trailing clouds of glory, is borne of another realm and place) is not a piece of cake.Neither is reading Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience.

Pretty Good
This is an excellent compilation of Blake's monumentous work in the English language. I am dissapointed, however, that this does not include some of my favorite poems by him, but it is still, in its entirety, very good. His language and masterful skill is beautiful and I suggest this volume because it is both content rich and economical. As for those who say Blake is a "dork," they might be too if they spend their free time insulting writers who died three hundred years ago. Anyway, happy reading!

Artful simplicity as poetic greatness
Blake is the master of the simple childlike deep and meaningful line. "Little Lamb , who made thee dost thou know who made thee" The lines of the first book are of innocence, before knowledge and experience have complicated the soul. The lines of the 'Songs of Experience" are of a more problematic reality. "Tiger Tiger burning bright in the forest of the night/ What immortal hand or eye/ Dare frame thy fearful symmetry/?
Blake is a thinker with an ideology, a revolutionary but I think his greatest value is not in the political or even metaphysical ideas but rather in the psychological apprehension in lines of beauty. Blake understands that wrath held within it will grow, but spoken wrath may go- he understands that the road to hell may be paved with good intentions. His proverbial quality is in this simple , or seemingly simple poetry too , and he is telling us about life and soul while uplifting us with lines which ring and remain in the mind.
These poems are Blake at his most accessible and memorable, whatever literary critics may say about the longer epic poems. These are the poems which have meant and will mean much to mankind. And they can be read with pleasure and puzzlement, over and over again.

The Human Abstract in Mystical Form
William Blake is one of the giants of poetry.He is often overlooked because of the obliqueness of many of his poems.But this affordable (read: cheap) collection of poems is well worth the price of admission. Most of Blakes most famous and well loved poems are included in thisvolume.Most of us had to read at least a couple of these poems in school. The Tyger still stands as one of the great poems of the English language.The Fly, The Lamb, Children of a Future Age, London and Ah, Sunflower areall included here.These are some of the most beautiful poems everwritten.Even if you struggle to understand the meaning, the sheer beautyand music of the verses can still carry you away.Anyone interested inpoetry needs to read these poems.It is among the best ever written.

Beautiful, significant poetry for those who know poetry.
In order to understand Blake's vision, it's helpful to know as much as possible about the social and historical context in which he was writing, and about the kinds of attitudes and social conditions he was addressing. Without that context, readers are unlikely to appreciate Blake as fully ashe deserves to be appreciated. Such readers may write uninformed andignorant reviews in this column.Those who understand the context in whichBlake was writing are likely to have a much deeper appreciation of Blake'spoetic beauty and sharp social conscience. ... Read more

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This short study draws on Blake's complete writings, his poetry and his prose. It offers a lively and perceptive account of his thought, ranging from his philosophy, his critique of existing society and culture, to his vision of a free world. Marshall presents Blake as a forerunner of modern anarchism and social ecology, and reveals the light which shines behind the misty mountain range (ahem) of his symbolism and mythology. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A great poetic thinker needs no ones endorsement
A simple song of William Blake
contains an apple and a snake
and he who dares to bite inside
will rage a fire of fratricide.

A simple song of William Blake
contains a whisper and a stream
and he who dares to kiss beside
drinks in water chastized.

A simple song of William Blake
contains a rose and apple tree
even Nature's Beauty
will never sense usFree.
... Read more

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et in the tumultuous eighteenth century, this novel weaves fact and fiction to tell the story of Kate Blake, 'the perfect wife' for the notoriously strange William Blake. Young and innocent, Kate searches for her identity in the shadow of Blake's genius-and struggles to understand his bohemian world of un-con-ventional principles, visions, and free love. Other Sorrows, Other Joys is historical fiction at its best, in the lush tradition of Girl With a Pearl Earring and Possession. ... Read more

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Fine Historical & Literary Fiction
If there are people who know less about William Blake than I did, I have not met them yet. However, I'm a bit more informed now, thanks to Warner's very insightful and intense novel, written primarily in the voice of Wm.'s wife, Kate. I found myself thinking as I read this that Janet Warner may have been channeling Kate Blake, I felt that much in the presence of this wonderful, caring and intelligent woman.It was such a perfect way (for me, anyway) to begin a study of Blake, who is such a towering and often obscure figure, and one so very singular as to make me nervous at times.But Kate's there, mob cap on her head, running the press beside William, considering finances when William can't be bothered. In Warner's telling, theirs seems a marriage of Air and Earth.

I was saddened to learn that Janet Warner passed away last year, but was comforted at the thought of her being able to enjoy the satisfaction of having produced this fine and original work, in addition to all her other accomplishments. It is a wonderful book, she got what feels like just the right tone for Kate, and wove in all the things large and small, about her life and his, and theirs together.I am so glad I found this book.

A different take on William Blake
The poet-prophet Blake casts such an intense blaze, it's all too easy to forget his wife Catherine, who stood beside him, supported & aided in his work, and provided a home & haven for his visions. This fine novel rectifies that omission, letting Catherine tell her own story in warm, sympathetic, but clear-eyed prose. She gives us a wonderfully detailed, day-by-day look at the world Blake moved in -- its politics, its fads, its intrigues. And she also makes us realize that being the wife of such a man is often no easy task! Yes, Blake was a truly remarkable figure ... but Catherine was no less remarkable, as the reader will certainly come to agree. For those who love Blake's work, it's a welcome addition to the Blake bookshelf. But even for those who know nothing about him, it's both an introduction to the man & an excellent novel about a unique marriage in its own right. Well worth seeking out!
... Read more

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William Blake: The Painter at Work offers an innovative and revealing approach to one of the most individual of all British artists. Although the highly idiosyncratic nature of Blake's techniques has long been recognized, this is the first book to explore the practical methods behind his unique style--providing a fuller understanding of exactly how this secretive artist worked as a painter.

Richly illustrated with Blake's temperas, watercolors, and color prints and drawings, the book includes essays by leading international authorities who illuminate Blake's techniques and materials using up-to-the-minute research methods. Their analysis of numerous individual works reveals, for example, that Blake used essentially the same range of colors in them all, even if some of the more than 100 temperas he painted from 1799 to 1826 have since darkened or faded.

The book consists of four main sections. Introductory chapters are followed by essays on Blake's watercolors, large color prints, and temperas. An epilogue discusses the presentation of the paintings, and appendices provide more detail on the works discussed. The contributors are John Anderson, Peter Bower, Noa Cahaner McManus, John Dean, Robin Hamlyn, Bronwyn Ormsby, Brian Singer, Joyce H. Townsend, and Piers Townshend.

William Blake: The Painter at Work not only casts new light on the incomparable oeuvre that made Blake one of the most perennially popular of visual artists but also points to ways of preserving this work for future generations. There are still unanswered questions, but now there are answers too.Amazon.com Review
Conservation scientist Joyce H. Townsend is the Tate Museum's answer to coroner Gus Grissom on TV's CSI. Only instead of solving murders, she sleuths out the violence done to great art. In this book, she and her colleagues explain the horrors time, faded pigments, and dumb owners have visited on Blake's paintings, use a slew of high-tech techniques to deduce his methods and open our eyes to his original intentions. If you haven't read this book, you probably don't know what Blake's work looks like. Skillfully employing gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, lasers, Fourier transform infra-red spectrometry, and good old-fashioned saliva on a cotton swab, they scrub away dirt, yellowed varnish, and moronic overpaintings, and reveal how Blake wanted you to see. A tiny edge of blue indicates the firmament that Satan originally strode through in the now-yellowed Satan in His Original Glory. The chemical "Maillard reaction" has horribly browned The Ghost of a Flea; a small detail illustration reveals the original brilliant, star-studded blue Blake intended. The detective work is fascinating, and the profuse illustrations both technically and esthetically illuminating. Blake would have sung hosannas over this book: it cleanses the doors of perception. --Tim Appelo ... Read more

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indispensable
An indispenasable book for those interested in the latest research
on William Blake's techniques as an artist. ... Read more

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receives a beautiful and powerful rendition in a series of vibrant images, each showing only a portion of the entire animal, which is fully revealed in a final four-page gatefold illustration. ... Read more

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Poetic Justice
I was introduced to this picture book in my Children's Literature class. The illustrations are vivid and thought provoking. This book is a beautiful extension of William Blake's classic poem and I reccommend it for childrenof all ages. ... Read more

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The core of William Blake's vision, his greatness as one of the British Romantics, is most fully expressed in his Illuminated Books, masterworks of art and text intertwined and mutually enriching. Made possible by recent advances in printing and reproduction technology, the publication of new editions of Jerusalem and Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1991 was a major publishing event. Now these two volumes are followed by The Early Illuminated Books and Milton, A Poem. The books in both volumes are reproduced from the best available copies of Blake's originals and in faithfulness and accuracy match the acclaimed standards set by Jerusalem and Songs. These two volumes are uniform in format and binding with the first two volumes.

The Early Illuminated Books comprises All Religions Are One and There Is No Natural Religion; Thel; Marriage of Heaven and Hell; and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Milton, A Poem, second only to Jerusalem in extent and ambition, is accompanied by Laocon, The Ghost of Abel, and On Homer's Poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Lots of helps for the general reader of this difficult lyric
The editors of this great work recognize its difficulties and that it is usually only the domain of specialists.They have filled to volume it commentary, notes, and helps to try and help the general reader to penetrate aspects of this extended poem / lyric / myth.The style is so personal to Blake and so unlike any other writer's style that it is hard for most of us to make sense of what each character means in any instance.A further difficulty is that there really isn't a narrative path or plot or much to help the reader move from one moment to the next.Blake had a view of reality has so multi-layered with each being having simultaneous multiple identities and manifestations that our normal way of viewing reality is quite useless.

The plates are beautifully reproduced with wonderful coloring and great images.It is a poem you can tackle as you wish, but plan on spending a lot of time thinking about it before it yields much to you.

For those readers who love Blake this is a great volume to add to your collection.

bet you never knew Milton was a ....!!!
I hate Blake.He and his Zoas and Los can go suck the ample breasts of Albion's emanation Jerusalem.At least Joyce (the only other person I know with this personal mythology splattered out for everyone) had a sense of humor.This guy, though.
Nevertheless, the illustrations are something, and there is something in the poem, I don't know exactly what it is (nor does anyone else, regardless of how convoluted and esoteric their arguments), but I'm convinced that in order to understand the least bit of these poems, you must read them all. Study them, in fact.The notes in this version are very good, and the extra illustrations are great, particularly the painting of Adam and Eve discovering Abel with Cain running off covering his newly marked forehead.Also, there is a large Lacoon, undoubtedly Blake's best thing. (I don't want to call it a poem, painting, or even "work" for some reason).

You don't know these people.
Try as I might, I haven't come up with the blend of radical individualism thwarted by universal awareness which would make this kind of book an intellectual treat for most people.I have read the poems by William Blake (just a few thousand lines, really) that are in this book before, and I even compared the abridged copy of his poems which I've had for years with a complete text from the library to discover what I could about the process of selection.Most of this is still a big mystery to a lot of people, and buying this book was my first attempt to get the whole picture of what a lot of professors might think about a single work, which is printed on plates numbered 1, then 1 to 8, 8*, 9 to 32, 32*, 33 to 46, then a Preface, copy B, plate 2, and even a plate f, followed by variations of the pictures which were on plate 13 and other Supplementary Illustrations.I had some trouble making out words on the colored plates, so the most educational part of the book for me is the printed text with notes from pages 111 to 217.

Milton is a great figure in English literature, and the great poems which place Satan and God in a struggle that makes Adam and Eve seem like minor characters are the intellectual context for Blake's effort to write a poem using Milton to write about things that minor characters wouldn't even want to talk about.Things don't really start happening for me until plate 12, "According to the inspiration of the Poetic Genius/Who is the eternal all-protecting Divine Humanity" that Milton actually rose up and said, "I go to Eternal Death!"Don't expect to meet anyone saying such things on our streets.This attempt to be instructive in the art of self-annihilation produces one of the great intellectual puzzles of eternal questions, which attempt not to apply to a particular place and time.My appreciation of John Milton and William Blake is more concerned with their ideas than with artistic techniques.The importance of Blake was suggested, more than it was demonstrated, by Theodore Roszak in THE MAKING OF A COUNTER CULTURE, Chapter VIII, "Eyes of Flesh, Eyes of Fire," which observes that a "perfectly sensible interpretation . . . would tell us, for example, that the poet Blake, under the influence of Swedenborgian mysticism, developed a style based on esoteric visionary correspondences . . . Etc.Etc.Footnote."(Roszak, p. 239).What really impressed me was the intellectual context established in the Bibliographical Notes, at the end of THE MAKING OF A COUNTER CULTURE, which states, "Anything Blake ever wrote seems supremely relevant to the search for alternative realities."(p. 302).The radical element of that thought needs to be understood in a way that affirms the religious significance of what Blake was trying to accomplish, and other scholars might overlook how this search in Blake's work might oppose their own assumptions about our cultural inheritance.Harold Bloom, in BLAKE'S APOCALYPSE, (1963, shortly before the radical part of the sixties) said "The dark Satanic Mills have nothing to do with industrialism, but" poetically pick the most common example for why those who are bored might want to complain of "The same dull round, even of a universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels."(Bloom, p. 305).There are a lot of names to explain, as Bloom does in his book, and the scholars employed by Tate Gallery Publications for the production of this book display an extraordinary amount of work on this project for that purpose, and the intellectual puzzles are what remains mysterious even after learning what knowledge is available.

At the heart of the poem, "Milton," is the question of what such a character might mean to William Blake, and how, long after Milton's death, he might be of some use.A lot of works have been written to give an author the opportunity to say something that he wouldn't have otherwise had a chance to say, and this book seems to be one of the unique cases of a work which tries to say something that no one else is saying.Instead of treating Milton like anyone who had been dead for more than a hundred years, the treatment of Milton's thought also supposes that it exists through an "Emanation, Sixfold presumably because he had three wives and three daughters."(Bloom, p. 308).Bloom thinks this book is a result of "a complex relation of responsibility to what he has made, though his creation is in torment because scattered through the creation."(p. 308).After John Milton had become blind, his wives and daughters represented a tremendous portion of his remaining contact with the world.

Walter Kaufmann, in LIFE AT THE LIMITS, considered a sonnet by the blind Milton about a dream in which one of his wives, who had died, was seen by him "Brought back to me like Alcestis from the grave."The reality expressed in the final line of that poem, "I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night," seemed to Kaufmann to be "the most powerful last line of any English short poem."(LIFE AT THE LIMITS, p. 75).Blake approached this situation, in which picturing another person might be considered the strongest link with any reality, with what modern readers might consider an unctiously religious picture on plate 15, with the caption (explained on p. 139 with, "The giving up of selfhood to achieve a more inclusive sense of self is essential for the artist to create" which isn't so scary if it is only applied to artists and monks):"To annihilate the Self-[there is a foot here in the picture]-hood of Deceit & False Forgiveness."Then plate 16 starts with "In those three females whom his Wives, & those three whom his Daughters/Had represented and containd.that they might be resume'd / By giving up of Selfhood:"This poetic division of a single poet into six male-female relationships is the most surprising thing in the poem, for me.Trying to apply it to religion states a much more radical understanding of what religion has to offer than most people expect if they merely go to church, which seems to be one of Roszak's points about how our culture accepts religion by making it strictly mainstream, totally "God Bless America" as the most popular current phrase goes.Much of the scholarship on the creation of Blake's large works notes how uncommercial it was in Blake's day, as "Hayley discouraged him from anything other than `the meer drudgery of business' (p. 14)" and this book tries to make that picture perfectly clear.

In one of the few small works at the end of this book, Blake complained:

The Classics, it is the Classics! / & not Goths nor Monks, that / Desolate Europe with Wars.(p. 264)

I feel the same way, complaining about some books, but Blake assumed a society in which people were actually being taught things like a Platonic belief in forms, and the Classics were a large element of what seemed bad to him.He might have felt differently if he ever had a chance to observe our formless void, where any claim to wisdom is highly suspect.We can only look the other way.

ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE
Princeton University Press has thoroughly impressed me with this series. Using higher quality paper than I've ever seen in publishing, along with an unheard-of *six* color printing process, they have reproduced the colorslike never before. In addition to the color plates, a full reprint of thetext is included in typescript, as well as informed and thoughtfulcommentary. Well done! Too bad the hardback is out of print (or was at thetime of this review). ... Read more

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22 engravings reproduced from proofs of the first edition and interpreted by a renowned Blake scholar. ... Read more

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Those students who have found only frustration in this giant mystic, will here find set forth the structural plan conceived to underlie the poet's cosmic conceptions, and to tie them into an organic whole. For this psychological key, the author has gone back for her sources to the ancient Scriptures, including the Kabbala, to the occult writings of Nietzsche, Thoreau, Boehme and Whitman and early Oriental philosophers. The key to the mystery of Blake is this: that he was a true seer and spokesman because he had come to an understanding of the processes of his own soul. Partial Contents: Symbolism in the songs; Great Crisis; Return to Illumination; Psychology of Symbol; Structural Plan of the Ancient Wisdom; Tiriel; Song of Liberty; America, Europe; Books of Urizen, Los, Ahania; Everlasting Gospel. ... Read more

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Includes 22 full-size reproduction of Blake's illustrations, with accompanying Biblical texts and Damon's commentary on facing pages. ... Read more

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Poor Reproductions
Unlike the beautiful reproductions in the 1966 printing, these are relatively small and bare of detail.However, if the later printing is unavailable, this book is worth purchasing for Damon's page-by-page concise and brilliant commentary. ... Read more

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The only manuscripts to survive that lead to the production of one of William Blake's published illuminated books are those of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, his most accessible and best-loved work. Here, one of the world's foremost authorities on Blake's manuscripts and illuminated printing details the evolution of this masterwork and its entire production process.

In the manuscript known as An Island in the Moon are found the beginnings of Songs of Innocence and in the Manuscript Notebook, a treasure of the British Library, over fifty poems in draft leading to Songs of Experience. All of the pages in manuscript of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are reproduced in color facsimile, including many of the drawings used in illustration, granting the reader a singular view of the artist's mind at work. Michael Phillips details the stages of Blake's composition and his remarkable technique of relief etching text and design on a single copperplate. For the first time, he demonstrates Blake's development of selective color printing of the design in opaque pigments over the original monochrome impression. Used in producing the first copies of Songs of Experience, this second step accounts for their dramatic contrast with the first issues of Songs of Innocence, which were hand-colored in transparent watercolors.

Blake united Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience in 1794 and produced copies in greater numbers than any other work until his death. In the past, the last copies Blake made have been reproduced because of their elaborate and expensive decoration. Phillips concentrates upon the first copies, revealing the original conception of the work. An impressive selection of these plates are reproduced for the first time.

This beautifully illustrated book is a major contribution to Blake studies. It will delight Blake enthusiasts and all who are fascinated by the extraordinary processes of creation and reproduction it describes. ... Read more

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From the introduction by Stanley Kunitz:

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In this thoughtful discussion of Blake's well-known Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Singer shows us that Blake was actually tapping into the collective unconscious and giving form and voice to primordial psychological energies, or archetypes, that he experienced in his inner and outer world. With clarity and wisdom, Singer examines the images and words in each plate of Blake's work, applying in her analysis the concepts that Jung brought forth in his psychological theories. Originally published as The Unholy Bible. Index. Bibliography. 24 plates. Part of the Jung on the Hudson Book Series. ... Read more

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"Must" readings for students of Carl Jung and William Blake.
June Singer's Blake, Jung, And The Collective Unconscious examines the words and images contained in Blake's works, considering Jung's concepts of archetypes and other ideas inherent in the verbal and visual images. Animportant, involving work. ... Read more

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The story of the life and work of the visionary poet and artist, William Blake. ... Read more

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UTILISSIMO
Non esiste una controparte italiana di questo prezioso volume, che in modo molto comprensibile consente al lettore di penetrare l'opera di William Blake.
Molto ben scritto....mai meramente didattico....una piacevole lettura.

Indispensabile per chi non voglia restare alle magre introduzioni dei vari libri disponibili da editori italiani. ... Read more