Blake's Poetry and Designs (Norton Critical Editions) [Paperback]

William Blake (Author), John E. Grant (Editor), Mary Lynn Johnson (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 039392498X | ISBN-13: 978-0393924985 | Publication Date: November 2007 | Edition: 2nd

The Second Edition of this revered Norton Critical Edition is the most comprehensive introduction to Blake’s poetry and thought available.

In addition to a broad selection of the poems, the volume includes over 100 images (16 in color), emphasizing the centrality of pictorial representations to Blake’s verse. Biographical context is provided through dozens of excerpts from Blake’s notebook, letters, marginalia, and other writings. “Criticism” offers twenty wide-ranging commentaries by writers from Blake’s contemporaries to present-day critics, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Northrop Frye, Allen Ginsberg, Morris Eaves, Harold Bloom, Alicia Ostriker, John Mee, Saree Makdisi, and Julia Wright. A section on Textual Technicalities, a Chronology of Blake’s life and work, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index of Titles and First Lines are also included.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

This thoroughly revised Second Edition of a perennial favorite in the Norton Critical Editions series, energized by recent scholarly discoveries and new links to the William Blake Archive (blakearchive.org) and other online resources, maintains its predecessors emphasis on the visual and verbal artistry of Blake's self-published works in illuminated printing. The new edition features more than a hundred designs, 16 in color; freshly annotated and re-edited complete texts of the illuminated books, now including the full text of *Jerusalem*, and a generous selection of Blake's other writings.

An expanded "Criticism" section presents 20 appraisals of Blake's work from his own time to the present. New to "Comments by Contemporaries" is Robert Hunt's devastating review of Blake's one-artist show in 1809, to which Blake responded with vitriolic epigrams and the creation of a major villain. "Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Perspectives," now introduced by Allen Ginsberg's personal vision of Blake, preserves earlier commentary by Northrop Frye, Martin K. Nurmi, and Harold Bloom, while adding W. J. T. Mitchell's recognition of the "Dangerous Blake," Joseph Viscomi's detective work on Blake's relief etching process Alicia Ostriker's multi-layered feminist analysis, historicist-cultural studies by Jon Mee, Saree Makdisi, and Julia Wright, and assessments of text-design permutations by Nelson Hilton, Stephen Behrendt, Morris Eaves, and V. A. De Luca.

Also included are an Introduction, a guide to Key Terms, a discussion of Textual Technicalities, a chronology of Blake's Life and Times, a Selected Bibliography, three maps, and Index of Sources, and an Index of Titles and First Lines.

About the Author

John E. Grant is Professor Emeritus of English, University of Iowa. He previously taught at the University of Connecticut. His publications include Discussions of William Blake and Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic.


Mary Lynn Johnson is Special Assistant Emerita, President's Office, University of Iowa. She is the co-author of Blake's ’Four Zoas’: The Design of the Dream.

Product Details

• Paperback: 704 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 2nd edition (November 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039392498X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393924985
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #55,141 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Come and see a world in a grain of sand . . ., July 10, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Blake's Poetry and Designs (Norton Critical Edition). Second Edition. (Paperback)

This is absolutely the best compendium of Blake's work which articualtes an outstanding range of his vision. This edition acknowledges the poetry and color paintings of a consumate craftsman of the imagination on high quality, acid free paper and is nylon stitched and bound in signatures to last a lifetime. Books are rarely made this way but the Norton edition is a beautiful rendering of the first, and perhaps, primary British Romantic poet.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good text for introducing Blake to students, September 10, 2002

By 

Craig Matteson (Saline, MI) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Blake's Poetry and Designs (Norton Critical Edition). Second Edition. (Paperback)

This is a book is quite good as most Norton Critical Editions are. It has a lot of what is needed by students for a course on Blake or, more likely, a course that spends part of a term on Blake.

It has some biographical material and some maps of England and London at the time Blake lived. There are also a good helping of black and white as well as color plates of Blake's illuminated works. The color plates are only good - the color is not produced beautifully. The student will only get an impression of the true power of Blake's artistry. However, a good teacher will point the student to the Blake Archive at:... so the students can see the works more completely with variants and in better color (if you have good video cards and monitors).

One of the best parts of this book begins on page 176 where working drafts are shown and compared to the final versions. There is also a nice selection of critical writing on Blake - criticism from Blake's time through the present. There is also a useful bibliography.

In some ways this is "Erdman Lite", but it is much more portable than Erdman and for an introductory course on Blake it is probably sufficient. I am glad that I have it in my library.

But please don't stop here!

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very solid edition of Blake's works, October 13, 2006

By 

Greg (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blake's Poetry and Designs (Norton Critical Edition). Second Edition. (Paperback)

William Blake is one of those soaring pioneers of the human imagination whose visions and their scope make you feel rather humble at times. His works are quite diverse and his output during his life very considerable. Blake's longer poems, such as 'Jerusalem' or the 'Four Zoas', would easily make large books of their own in any edition of his works.

This Norton's edition contains selections from several of Blake's major works, including his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, his visionary poems, as well as his political poems. The book also contains many scholarly aids including a chronology of Blake's life, critical essays by leading Blake scholars, and colour pages showing Blake's beautiful illustrations to some of his works (as well as being a great poet Blake was also a painter and engraver of very considerable ability). While critics never seem to really reach any consensus on what Blake's poems really 'mean' (Blake is read variously as a Gnostic by Harold Bloom, a revolutionary critic of England during the industrial revolution by Terry Eagleton, or as a disciple of Swedenborg and Boehme by others) Blake's poems contain incredible beauty and visionary power and polyvalent symbols energised with multiple meanings. I think if one consistent theme can be read from Blake and his poems, and I think this was his own intent, was that the power of the human imagination and what it produces in art transcends any attempt to 'bracket' or reduce it to a dead and static system of lifeless scientific symbols; I imagine Blake would class many critics of his work as agents of Urizen, trying to carve out of the fiery energized cosmos of the living human mind the perfect frozen archetype which orders all things perfectly but in doing so, misses the whole point.

Blake's poems then should be read not by trying to impose what you want to see in them but by trying to let them speak to you and perhaps, ignite your own spark of imagination, as Blake has done with many brilliant poets from Yeats to Allan Ginsberg and many others.