The Portable Blake
"Blake was a lyric poet interested chiefly in ideas, and a painter who did not believe in nature. He was a commercial artist who was a genius in poetry, painting, and religion. He was a libertarian obsessed with God, a mystic who reversed the mystical pattern, for he sought man as the end of his search." This is how Alfred Kazin, in his introduction to this volume, proclaims the fierce and messianic vision of William Blake, an English poet and artist of the romantic era whose work remains utterly sui generis, though it influenced later artists from the surrealists to the American Beats.
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 Albion, America, 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.
Blake is nowhere better presented for the general reader. The introduction is...probably the best essay yet composed on the subject. --Saturday Review
An inspired selection. --The New York Times
The best of William Blake (and then some!), taken off the shelf, dusted off and propped up for the rest of eternity to consider. From the aphorisms of "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (required reading) to the later prophetic books, it's Blake in all of his...Blakeness. And let's give a hand to Kazin for his fantastic Introduction to one of the heavy-hitters of the Western tradition. --Reviewer: A reader from New York City
