Customer Reviews

The poems of William Blake; (Longmans' annotated English poets)

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Contains Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Book of Thel only. Text is poorly formated; the line breaks are all screwed up. Blake is something you really really need to see on a page so do yourself a favor and buy a physical copy...ideally with the beautiful etchings which Blake melded with the text.

Auguries of Innocence "to see the world in a grain of sand" is missing in the edition which I could see online - I bought it as a gift and my friend told me that the pages numbers do not match the description and the index of first lines - which puts the poem on a page that is not there. There are fewer pages than described

Formatting is a key consideration to writing and reading poetry. This edition has no line breaks, and the formatting is very poor. But the text is intact, and how can you argue with free?

I am not much of a poetry fan but have always loved the writings of William Blake. Here is a free version of some of his works. It is readable, and the fact that it is free prevents me from complaining too much.

The formatting is terrible. There is no table of contents. There are no hyperlinks. These problems make it difficult to know what exactly is in the book, and it makes it hard to find what you are looking for. As far as I can tell this collection contains the entirety of Songs of Innocence and Experience and a few other poems. Also there are few line breaks. An 8 line stanza is often seen as a single paragraph with semicolons separating the original lines. With any other poet this would make the book unreadable, but Blake's words are so rhythmic and clear that you can easily read them out loud or silently even when formatted poorly on the page. Some reviewers have complained that there is different text and/or missing poems when compared to other versions. I won't argue with them because, although I have read Blake several times, I am no expert.

So if you have to read Songs of Innocence and Experience right now and don't have any money, go ahead and get this book. You will enjoy it. But in the long run it is much better to get a better formatted version - preferably a hardbound volume that will look beautiful on your shelf and provide satisfying poetic readings for years to come.

I wonder how William Blake would feel about his work being rendered or redacted on the Kindle? To quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "To create a little flower is the labour of ages." This little flower includes Blake's earlier work: "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" "The Book of Thel" "Songs of Innocence" (engraved in 1789 the year of the outbreak of the French Revolution).


This Kindle free edition is more of an appetizer for readers interested in discovering Blake. However, you get what you pay for. Do yourself a favor and dig deeper, when reading or studying Blake buy William Blake The Complete Poems published by Penguin Classics and Edited by Alicia Ostriker The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics) or even better stll, purchase a copy of Paul V. Erdman's The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake

Note on Kindle formatting: Editing and formatting poetry for the Kindle is an taskmaster, and I suspect the editors of this work were not budgeted to be that meticulous or fastidious in their editing. However, there are frequent misuses and abuses of exclamations (Merry, merry sparrow!) and quotation marks which breaks the flow of the Blake's poetry.

In the end, this is a free Kindle edition and you can't complain about that, but so is advice and it is up to you when to follow it or take it.