The Complete Poems

PENGUIN ENGLISH POETS
GENERAL EDITOR: CHRISTOPHER RICKS

WILLIAM BLAKE:
THE COMPLETE POEMS

WILLIAM BLAKE was born in Broad Street in 1757, the son of a London hosier. Having attended Henry Parr’s drawing school in the Strand, he was in 1772 apprenticed to Henry Basire, engraver to the Society of Antiquaries, and later was admitted as a student to the Royal Academy, where he exhibited in 1780. He married Catherine Boucher in 1782 and in 1783 published Poetical Sketches. The first of his ‘illuminated books’ was Songs of Innocence (1789), which, like The Book of Thel (published in the same year), has as its main themes the celebration of innocence and its inviolability.

Blake sets out his ideas more fully in his chief prose work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1791), which proclaims his lifelong belief in the moral primacy of the imagination. But in Songs of Experience (1794) he recognizes the power of repression, and in a series of short narrative poems he looks for mankind’s redemption from oppression through a resurgence of imaginative life. By 1797 he was ready for epic; Vala was never finished, but in Milton and Jerusalem he presents his renewed vision of reconciliation among the warring fragments of humanity. Other striking poems of his middle years are the lyrics of the Pickering Manuscript, and The Everlasting Gospel, but in the last years of his life he expressed himself in drawing rather than poetry.

Little of Blake’s work was published on conventional form. He combined his vocations as poet and graphic artist to produce books that are visually stunning. He also designed illustrations of works by other poets and devised his own technique for producing large watercolour illustrations and colour-printed drawings. Blake died in 1827, ‘an Old Man feeble & tottering but not in Spirit & Life not in the Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever’.

ALICIA OSTRIKER is Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA.

WILLIAM BLAKE

The Complete Poems

Edited by
ALICIA OSTRIKER

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Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 1977
Reprinted with revised Further Reading 2004
26

Editorial material copyright © Alicia Ostriker, 1997, 2004

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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Contents

Preface

Table of Dates

Further Reading

The Poems

Poetical Sketches

Miscellaneous Poems

King Edward the Third

Dramatic Fragments

Poems Written in a Copy of Poetical Sketches

Songs from ‘An Island in the Moon’

There is No Natural Religion [a,b]

All Religions are One

The Book of Thel

Tiriel

Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Songs of Innocence

Songs of Experience

Notebook Poems and Fragments, c. 1789–93

The French Revolution

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

A Song of Liberty

Visions of the Daughters of Albion

America

Europe

The Song of Los

Africa

Asia

The Book of Urizen

The Book of Ahania

The Book of Los

Vala, or The Four Zoas

Notes Written on the Pages of The Four Zoas

Additional Fragments

Three Poems, ?c. 1800

Poems from Letters

Notebook Poems, c. 1800–1806

Poems from the Pickering Manuscript

Milton

Dedication to Blake’s Illustrations to Blair’s Grave

Notebook Epigrams and Satiric Verses, c. 1808–12

Miscellaneous Verses and Epigrams

Verse from the Marginalia to Reynolds’s Discourses

Verse from the Advertisement to Blake’s Exhibition of Paintings, 1809

Epigrams from A Descriptive Catalogue

Epigrams from ‘Public Address’

Jerusalem

The Everlasting Gospel

For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise

The Ghost of Abel

Notes

Dictionary of Proper Names

Note to the Indexes

Index of Titles

Index of First Lines

Preface

William Blake is the rebel par excellence of English poetry, who sets his face against convention and restriction of every sort, glorifies untrammelled inspiration and defends the artist’s liberty, in matters of literary format as well as in his religious, political and social ideas. Almost none of his work was published in conventional printed form. Pursuing his vocations as poet and graphic artist simultaneously, he printed most of it himself, with text (in his own orthography) and illustrations commonly intertwined, by a method of etching he invented for the purpose. Copies of individual works often vary, not only in the character of the water-colour timings he gave them, but also in the order of the plates and in words or lines which appear in some copies but are deleted in others. Blake’s spelling, punctuation and grammar obey his individual temperament. Many of his poems, including some major ones, exist only in much-revised manuscript form.

No conventionally type-set edition of Blake’s poetry can compete, either in beauty or in clarity, with the original illuminated books produced by the poet; neither can it suggest the full complexity of the texts in manuscript. Given these limitations, however, the intention of this edition is to reproduce the work with as much fidelity as possible to the forms in which he wrote it. ‘Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius,’ Blake remarked. Intrigued readers may be lured onward to the originals, or to the many excellent facsimile editions of them which fortunately exist today.

Spelling, grammar, punctuation. Most readers will not be troubled by Blake’s often archaic or eccentric spelling, his frequent use of capitalization for emphasis, his predilection for the rapid ‘&’ as opposed to the conventional ‘and’, and his sometimes crude grammar. These peculiarities have usually been accepted by Blake’s editors and readers alike as quirky but charming. A greater stumbling-block is Blake’s punctuation, which is at all times idiosyncratic, and at some times, particularly in the manuscript poems, virtually non-existent. Most standard editions of Blake have supplied a conventional punctuation, but to alter in this matter is clearly to distort. I have therefore followed the procedure of David V. Erdman in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, retaining the poet’s punctuation and non-punctuation intact. As a rule, any punctuation mark may be taken simply as a sign for a greater or lesser pause in the flow of language, rather than as an indicator of grammatical relationships. With a little relaxation and practice, the reader will find that this is less difficult than it appears at first, and finally that it may create a sense of freedom and buoyancy, and an openness of syntactic construction, which bring considerable aesthetic and intellectual pleasure.

Revisions.