Blake's Poetry and Designs (Norton Critical Editions)
This thoroughly revised Second Edition of a perennial favorite in the Norton Critical Editions series, energized by recent scholarly discoveries and new links to the William Blake Archive (blakearchive.org) and other online resources, maintains its predecessors emphasis on the visual and verbal artistry of Blake's self-published works in illuminated printing. The new edition features more than a hundred designs, 16 in color; freshly annotated and re-edited complete texts of the illuminated books, now including the full text of *Jerusalem*, and a generous selection of Blake's other writings.An expanded "Criticism" section presents 20 appraisals of Blake's work from his own time to the present. New to "Comments by Contemporaries" is Robert Hunt's devastating review of Blake's one-artist show in 1809, to which Blake responded with vitriolic epigrams and the creation of a major villain. "Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Perspectives," now introduced by Allen Ginsberg's personal vision of Blake, preserves earlier commentary by Northrop Frye, Martin K. Nurmi, and Harold Bloom, while adding W. J. T. Mitchell's recognition of the "Dangerous Blake," Joseph Viscomi's detective work on Blake's relief etching process Alicia Ostriker's multi-layered feminist analysis, historicist-cultural studies by Jon Mee, Saree Makdisi, and Julia Wright, and assessments of text-design permutations by Nelson Hilton, Stephen Behrendt, Morris Eaves, and V. A. De Luca.Also included are an Introduction, a guide to Key Terms, a discussion of Textual Technicalities, a chronology of Blake's Life and Times, a Selected Bibliography, three maps, and Index of Sources, and an Index of Titles and First Lines.