About the book:
A working student edition of Blake Songs of Innocence and Experience and the territory around them, annotated for close reading rather than casual browsing.
For anyone who wants the visionary stuff with the apparatus to actually parse it.
Condition:
Good secondhand condition.
Spine a bit beat up - discounted accordingly.
Wear to cover.
All pages bright, well bound, and intact.
Browse our other listings:
https://www.bobshop.co.za/seller/5375758/Orphan_Books
About the author:
William Blake (1757 to 1827)
Born in London in 1757, William Blake was the son of a hosier and received little formal education. Apprenticed to an engraver at fourteen, he developed exceptional artistic and poetic skills. Throughout his life he saw visions and claimed to communicate with angels and spirits, experiences that shaped his intensely mystical and prophetic art. He lived in relative poverty and obscurity, working as a printmaker and poet.
His early success was limited during his lifetimehe was largely dismissed as eccentricbut his reputation grew dramatically after his death. Blake developed a highly original style that fused poetry, visual art, and prophecy. He created illuminated books, hand-printed works combining text and image in a radical, visionary form. His language is musical, symbolic, and often deliberately difficult.
Deeply influenced by the Bible, Milton, and his own visionary experiences, Blake in turn became one of the most important figures in English Romanticism and a major influence on modern poetry and art. He profoundly shaped writers such as W.B. Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, and many countercultural and visionary poets, and is adjacent to figures like John Milton, William Wordsworth, and later mystics and rebels in literature.
Recurring preoccupations include the tension between innocence and experience, the oppressive nature of organized religion and industrial society, the power of imagination, the divine in the everyday, and the need for personal and social liberation. Major works include Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Milton, and Jerusalem.
Blake died in 1827 at the age of 69. His grave was unmarked for many years.
William Blakes influence on world literature and art is immense: he championed the power of the imagination against rationalist and industrial forces while remaining utterly unique in his combination of prophetic vision, lyrical beauty, and radical humanism.
