William Blake, an English poet, painter, and printmaker, created work largely unrecognized in his time but now considered seminal in both poetry and visual arts. His prophetic poetry, described as forming "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the language," alongside his visual artistry, has led critics to proclaim him Britain's greatest artist. Blake's creative vision embraced 'imagination' as "the body of God," engendering a diverse and symbolically rich corpus. Today, he is highly regarded for his expressiveness, creativity, and the philosophical and mystical currents underlying his work, though his originality and singularity make classification difficult.
This is a selection of the poet's work, including all the great lyrics and the more important prophetic books. In her introduction the poet and critic expounds Blake's esoteric theory and shows how it helped to create a poetry which is unlike any other.
Critical commentary illuminating Blake's allusions and references accompanies the texts of his poetic and prose works
This edition includes almost all Blake's substantive variants with the exception of some in the exceptionally complex manuscript of Vala, or the Four Zoas.
The book features twenty meditations designed to help readers master both inquiry and mindfulness meditation techniques. Mindfulness meditation focuses on calming distracting thoughts, while inquiry meditation encourages seeking answers from Inner Silence regarding challenging relationship and work-related issues.
In 1809 the little-known artist William Blake held an exhibition of his work in a private house in Soho in the west end of London. It was not a success. The only review in the press was extremely unfavourable and few of the public came. One of those who did was the poet Charles Lamb, who later described the catalogue that accompanied the show as 'mystical and full of vision'. It is this catalogue that this edition once more makes available. In it, the scale and range of Blake's ambition are made plain, along with his theories on painting, his unsparing critiques of other artists and some extraordinary insights into the working of his mind. Part commentary and part manifesto, it is as radical as it is eccentric; (he claims at one point to have been transported in a 'vision' back to the classical world). Fully illustrated in colour with reproductions of surviving works originally in the exhibition, the book includes an essay by Martin Myrone, a leading authority on Blake and British art of the period, making it an essential purchase for all of those wanting to know more about the life and work of this fascinating and enigmatic figure.
A visionary of eighteen-century English art, William Blake was largely unknown during his own lifetime and often rejected as a madman for claims of hearing voices and later having visions. Since his death, Blake has achieved enduring fame for his innovative and extraordinary work and is widely viewed as one of the most important of all English artists. Created between 1790 and 1793, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" is considered by many to be one of his most original and inspired books. Written largely in criticism of Emanuel Swedenborg's 1758 work "Heaven and Hell", which argued in favor of a strict moral structure and a clear distinction between good and evil, Blake instead viewed the world as unified where both the heaven of the physical world and the hell of desire and passion were all part of the same divine plan. Written in the form of imaginary Biblical prophecies, Blake created a world where contradictory impulses and emotions are all necessary parts of existence and where each person must embrace these paradoxical characteristics of human nature in order to progress in life. The result of Blake's vision is a dynamic and thought-provoking masterpiece from one of history's most eccentric and brilliant artists. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper and reproduces one of the first set of plates in full color along with a complete transcription of the poem.
This single volume contains all of Blake's illuminated books, reproduced from the best available originals. It is published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Tate Gallery in the autumn of 2000
By turns a haunting lyricist, an apocalyptic visionary, and an unorthodox thinker, Blake was for years ignored or derided. Sustained by his belief in the artistic imagination, he drafted poetry, prose visions, and epigrams, and manufactured beautiful illustrated volumes of his lyrics and verse narratives. Towards the end of his life, Blake's unique and irreducible talent was recognized by a group of younger artists, who rescued much of his achievement from oblivion.
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY PATTI SMITHWilliam Blake is one of Britain s most fascinating writers, who, as well as being a groundbreaking poet, is also well known as a painter, engraver, radical and mystic. Although Blake was dismissed as an eccentric by
