Poems of William Blake, edited by W.B. Yeats (1905)

S$86.00

Poems of William Blake, edited by W.B. Yeats (1905)

S$86.00

Title: Poems of William Blake
Author: William Blake, W.B. Yeats (ed.)
Publisher: George Routledge & Sons, undated. Part of The Muses’ Library series.
Condition: Cloth bound, gilt to spine. No printing date, but with an inscription dated 1905. Pocket si

SKU: blake-1905 Categories: ,

Title: Poems of William Blake
Author: William Blake, W.B. Yeats (ed.)
Publisher: George Routledge & Sons, undated. Part of THe Muses’ Library series.
Condition: Cloth bound, gilt to spine. No printing date, but with an inscription dated 1905. Pocket size. Probably the second printing of the book. A few sparse annotations, but text generally clean. Binding tight. A newspaper article on Blake pasted on first blank pages of book. Published during Yeats’ lifetime.

 

About William Blake (from Wikipedia):

William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form “what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language”. His visual artistry led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him “far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced”. In 2002, Blake was placed at number 38 in the BBC’s poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.Although he lived in London his entire life (except for three years spent in Felpham), he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as “the body of God” or “human existence itself”.

Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of the Romantic movement and “Pre-Romantic”, for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England (indeed, to all forms of organised religion), Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American Revolutions, though later he rejected many of these beliefs he maintained an amiable relationship with Thomas Paine, he was also influenced by thinkers such as Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake’s work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th-century scholar William Rossetti characterised him as a “glorious luminary”, and “a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors”.

About Yeats (from Wikipedia):

William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honoured for what the Nobel Committee described as “inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.” Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). Yeats was a very good friend of American expatriate poet and Bollingen Prize laureate Ezra Pound. Yeats wrote the introduction for Gitanjali, which was about to be published by the India Society.

Although Yeats’s early works drew heavily on Shelley, Edmund Spenser, and on the diction and colouring of pre-Raphaelite verse, he soon turned to Irish mythology and folklore and the writings of William Blake. In later life, Yeats paid tribute to Blake by describing him as one of the “great artificers of God who uttered great truths to a little clan”.