William Blake

Since it was first published in 1965, David V. Erdman's edition has been widely hailed as easily the best available text of Blake's poetry and prose. Comparing it to other Blake texts, Michael J. Tolley in Southern Review observed that it has "very much fuller textual annotations; and incorporates a remarkable number of new readings, including an almost complete recovery of the suppressed or altered passages in Jerusalem and many new readings of hitherto dubious passages in the manuscript, including many in The Four Zoas."

Characterized by an extraordinarily imaginative language and a forcefulness and suppleness of rhythms, Blake's poetry possesses a remarkable muscularity and exuberance. Even at its most difficult it excites, while never losing contact with the ordinary realities of life.

Blake was one of the finest craftsmen of his time, an artist for whom art and poetry were inextricably linked. He was an independent and rebellious thinker, who abhorred pretension and falsity in others. His Songs of Innocence are products of this innocent imagination untainted by worldliness, while the Songs of Experience resulted from his feelings of indignation and pity for the sufferings of mankind. The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, containing some of Blake's finest and best-loved poems, are present here in the form which satisfied the high expectations of his poetic and artistic aspirations. The fifty-four plates which Blake originally etched and coloured by hand, are faithfully reproduced with the same delicacy and dimensions as the artist created them.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was created early in Blake's series of illuminated books, each of which was presented by him as an attractive work of art made entirely by his own hand. Written principally in prose, the Marriage represents Blake's first full-scale attempt to present his philosophic message.The twenty-seven colour plates are reproduced from one of only nine remaining copies of the work.Keynes comments upon each of the plates, discussing Blake's argument, and provides a helpful and enlightening introduction.

The Portable Blake contains this 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 Albian, American, 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