Customer Reviews

Blake's Poetry and Designs (Norton Critical Editions)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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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.

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!

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.

With apologies for self-promotion (awarding this book 4 stars so as not to bring down the average), I just want to point out that the old 1979 cover, the "Look Inside" feature, and the existing reviews here are misleading because they do not reflect changes in our new 2008 edition. This new throughly reworked and updated edition now contains all of Blake's *Jerusalem*, revised introductions and notes, a reallocated section of criticism (reflecting developments since 1979), more lightly punctuated texts, much more beautifully reproduced color images of Blake's own designs (17, counting the cover), an expanded chronology, enhanced maps, and numerous cross-references to web resources, especially the William Blake Archive[...] and the University of Georgia's eE (electronic Erdman) and Blake Concordance please see:
[...]

Mary Lynn Johnson & John E. Grant
(we welcome feedback at john-grant@uiowa.edu)

The editors of this text did a fine job. I've noticed especially their choice of page breaks and quotations on the more difficult poems (the Prophetic Books) are admirable. They've made the poetry from our beloved William Blake accessible to a wider audience by editing his text to decrease the chance of confusion through mere ambiguity.

Nice book, but too bad its front picture cover is defaced by Norton's double-layer of big gold stickers with high-tack adhesive that makes them impossible to remove without adhesive remaining on the cover.