The complete illuminated books

The complete illuminated books - William Blake

In his Illuminated Books, William Blake combined text and imagery on a single page in a way that had not been done since the Middle Ages. For Blake, religion and politics, intellect and emotion, mind and body were both unified and in conflict with each other: his work is expressive of his personal mythology, and his methods of conveying it were integral to its meaning. There is no comparison with reading books such as Jerusalem, America, and Songs of Innocence and of Experience in Blake's own medium, infused with his sublime and exhilarating colors. Tiny figures and forms dance among the lines of the text, flames appear to burn up the page, and dense passages of Biblical-sounding text are brought to a jarring halt by startling images of death, destruction, and liberation. Blake's hope that his books would obtain wide circulation was unfulfilled: some exist only in unique copies and none was printed in more than very small numbers. Now, for the first time, the plates from the William Blake Trust's Collected Edition have been brought together in a single volume, with transcripts of the texts and an introduction by the noted scholar David Bindman. Includes: Jerusalem; Songs of Innocence and of Experience; All Religions are One; There is No Natural Religion; The Book of Thel; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Visions of the Daughters of Albion; America a Prophecy; Europe a Prophecy; The Song of Los Milton a Poem; The Ghost of Abel; On Homers Poetry and] On Virgil; Laocoon; The First Book of Urizen; The Book of Ahania; The Book of Los. Long regarded as a brilliant eccentric whose works skirted the outer fringes of English art and literature, William Blake (1757–1827) is today recognized as a major poet and one of the most original and exciting English painters. Nowhere is Blake's glorious poetic and pictorial legacy more evident than in this monumental study of his illuminated poems. Compiled and annotated by one of the world's foremost Blake scholars, the book's original publication represented the first working edition of the entire illuminated canon. Accompanied by David V. Erdman's erudite and penetrating analysis, the meticulously reproduced plates reveal the poet/artist's singular attempt to achieve the perfect union of painting and poetry. Commenting on such Blakean masterpieces as The Book of Thel, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Song of Los, The Book of Urizen, and other works, Professor Erdman discusses the details of each illustration in the context of the poem it accompanies. All but the largest plates are reproduced in their original sizes.