From the introduction by Stanley Kunitz:

Blake speaks more directly to us, anticipating the issues, conflicts, and anxieties of the modern world, than any of his contemporaries. It could be argued that he dared, in fact, to be the first modern poet. . . .

Above all, Blake teaches us that the imagination is a portion of the divine principle, that "Energy is Eternal Delight," and that "everything that lives is Holy." Human liberty and imagination have never been better served.

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...

This volume, introduced by Max Plowman, who edited the selection, consists first of works printed and illustrated by Blake among these are: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Milton, a poem in two books, Jerusalem, and a facsimile reproduction in full of The Gates of Paradise, the little booklet of engravings about 1820. Then the most important of the works that remain in manuscripts such as those of Pickering and Rossetti, including The Last Judgement, The Everlasting Gospel, and nearly forty...

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of poems by William Blake. This is an important publication for those who are fans of the writings of William Blake, and should not be passed up by students or scholars of poetry. Make sure to add this edition to your William Blake poems and continue discover the beauty and mystery to Blake's writings for longtime fans and for those discovering his work for the first time.

Since its first publication in 1965, this collection has been widely hailed as the best available text of William Blake's poetry and prose. It is now expanded to include a new foreword by Harold Bloom, his definitive statement on Blake's greatness.

The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and the poems from the Rossetti manuscript, are the poems of a man with a profound interest in human emotions, and a profound knowledge of them. The emotions are presented in an extremely simplified, abstract form. This form is one illustration of the eternal struggle of art against education, of the literary artist against the continuous deterioration of language.

The First Complete English-Russian Bilingual Edition of the series of early Books by William Blake (1757-1827) The 2nd volume of Complete Blake Works includes "An Island in the Moon," three early Prophetic Books "Tiriel," "The Book of Thel," "The French Revolution," and also three essays on religions in both English and Russian languages. D. Smirnov-Sadovsky is a pseudonym of a composer Dmitri N. Smirnov. He was born in 1948 in Minsk, graduated from Moscow Conservatory. About 40 of Smirnov's music works reflect his fascination with the poetry and art of William Blake. That includes operas...

Songs of Innocence and of Experience By William Blake, Editorial Oneness (Edited by)

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of poems by William Blake. It appeared in two phases. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William Blake himself in 1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. "Innocence" and "Experience" are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton's existential-mythic states of "Paradise" and the "Fall." Blake's categories are modes of perception that tend to coordinate with a chronology that would...

RINTRAH roars and shakes his fires in the burden'd air, Hungry clouds swag on the deep. Once meek, and in a perilous pathThe just man kept his course alongThe Vale of Death.Roses are planted where thorns grow, And on the barren heathSing the honey bees. Then the perilous path was planted, And a river and a springOn every cliff and tomb;And on the bleached bonesRed clay brought forth: Till the villain left the paths of easeTo walk in perilous paths, and driveThe just man into barren climes. Now the sneaking serpent walksIn mild humility;And the just man rages in the wildsWhere lions roam....