The Selected Poems Of William Blake

William Blake is one of England's most original artists whose works aim to liberate imaginative energies. This volume contains his greatest writings and a generous selection from the Prophetic Books including Milton and Jerusalem.

This first comprehensive selection of Blake's poetry and prose in modernized form with complete annotation fully represents his extraordinarily diverse achievements and breaks new ground in elucidating his powerful prose. Organized by genre and subject for easy accessibility to the student and first-time reader, as well as to the specialist, the anthology includes nearly all of Blake's poetry and prose works and some of his letters. The epic narratives Milton and Jerusalem are reproduced in full, and an index of Blakean names and motifs is included.

A selection of Blake's poetry made by William Butler Yeats in 1905, which helped to restore the reputation and awareness of Blake, who had been undervalued and forgotten up until then.

Features 104 of Blake's poems: "A Song of Liberty," "The Argument," "Proverbs of Hell," "The Mental Traveller," "The Land of Dreams," "To the Evening Star" and many more.

Blake occupies a very special place in the pantheon of English Romanticism: just as innovative and brilliant as a painter and draughtsman as in the field of poetry, he created works that are often difficult to categorize and that, while harking back to a classical and biblical past, also look forward to the future – with authors such as T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and the Beat poets among his many modern admirers. This volume includes an essential selection of Blake's poetry, from the lesser-known Poetical Sketches to his celebrated Songs of Innocence and of Experience and the “prophetic works” inspired by the French Revolution, covering over two decades of poetical activity and displaying the author's originality and independence of mind at their sparkling best.

A selection of Blake's poetry made by William Butler Yeats in 1905, which helped to restore the reputation and awareness of Blake, who had been undervalued and forgotten up until then.

'To see a World in a Grain of Sand 'And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour' William Blake wrote some of the most moving and memorable verse in the English language. Deeply committed to visionary and imaginative experience, yet also fiercely engaged with the turbulent politics of his era, he is now recognised as a major contributor to the Romantic Movement. This edition presents Blake's poems in their literary categories and genres to which they belong: his much-loved lyrics, ballads, comic and satirical verse, descriptive and discursive poems, verse epistles, and, finally, his remarkable 'prophetic' poems, including the whole of his two diffuse epics, Milton and Jerusalem. Blake's poetry is intellectually challenging as well as formally inventive, and this edition has a substantial critical introduction which places his ideas in the contemporary context of the Enlightenment and the artistic reaction against its key assumptions.