The Portable William Blake

Description

The Portable Blake contains the hermetic genius’s most important works: 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.Editor’s Acknowledgments
Introduction

Prospectus: To the Public

I. The Young Blake
From “Poetical Sketches”

II. There Is No Natural Religion and All Religions Are One
There Is No Natural Religion
All Religions Are One

III. Songs of Innocence and Of Experience
Songs of Innocence
Songs of Experience
Additional Poems

IV. Verses and Fragments
First Series, 1793-1799
Second Series, 1800-1810

V. Selections from the Letters
Editor’s Note

VI. The Prophetic Books
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise
The Book of Thel
Visions of the Daughters of Albion
America
Europe
The First Book of Urizen
The Book of Ahania
The Book of Los
The Song of Los
Selections from “The Four Zoas”
Selections from “Milton”
Selections from “Jerusalem”

VII. On Art, Money, and the Age
From “The Laocoön Group”
From “A Descriptive Catalogue”
From “Public Address”
On Homer’s Poetry and On Virgil
Marginalia, I
Epigrams and Verses Concerning Sir Joshua Reynolds
Marginalia, II
Epigrams, Verses, and Fragments

VIII. The Old Blake
Fragments
The Everlasting Gospel
A Vision of the Book of Job
Editor’s Prefatory Note
The Engravings
A Vision of the Last Judgment

Appendix
From Crabb Robinson’s Reminiscences
Blake Chronology
Bibliography by Aileen Ward
Index of Titles and First Lines of Poems

WILLIAM BLAKE was born in London in 1757. He was educated at home and then worked as an apprentice to the engraver James Basire before joining the Royal Academy in 1779. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, and a year later began his career as a poet when he published Poetical Sketches. This was followed by Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), which he also designed and engraved. His other major literary works include The Book of Thel (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1793), Milton (1804–8), and Jerusalem (1804–20). He produced many paintings and engravings during his lifetime. Blake died in 1827.

ALFRED KAZIN was born in Brooklyn in 1915. His first book of criticism, On Native Grounds (1942), was a groundbreaking study of American literature that changed radically our way of looking at it, and established him overnight as a major figure. In a series of books of his own since then, and in many critically edited texts of classic American literary works, he established himself as our preeminent man of letters. He taught widely at Harvard, Smith, Amherst, Hunter College, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and elsewhere. In 1996 he received from the Truman Capote Literary Trust its first Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism (in memory of Newton Arvin). He died in 1998.US

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