First appearing in 1981, this book was the first full-length study of the Songs of Innocence and Experience to be published in almost fifteen years. The book provides detailed readings of each poem and its accompanying design, to redirect attention to the nature and achievement of the book as a whole, to Songs as a single, carefully unified work of verbal and visual art. Particularly close attention is paid, not only to the designs Blake etched to accompany his poems, but also to the many books and treatises for and about children to which, it is argued, Songs alludes or is indebted. Like so many important works of this period, Songs is shown to be autobiographical in nature, one of Blake’s attempts to order and account for the conflicts and crises of his own art and life. Its story is that of an artist’s growth into and out of vision, and of his gradual realization of the dangers and deficiencies of the prophetic mode.

William Blake's illuminated poems challenge their readers to participate fully in a highly interactive process of reading. The complex interaction of their verbal and visual texts forces the involved reader to assume greater responsibility than usual for formulating meaning. This book examines some of the ways in which Blake's illuminated poems subvert the customary authority of texts and force readers to reassess both their expectations about reading and their customary responses to words and visual images alike.

A new, exciting and accessible approach to reading William Blake, in which leading scholar Saree Makdisi explores key themes.

First appearing in 1981, this book was the first full-length study of the Songs of Innocence and Experience to be published in almost fifteen years. The book provides detailed readings of each poem and its accompanying design, to redirect attention to the nature and achievement of the book as a whole, to Songs as a single, carefully unified work of verbal and visual art. Particularly close attention is paid, not only to the designs Blake etched to accompany his poems, but also to the many books and treatises for and about children to which, it is argued, Songs alludes or is indebted. Like so many important works of this period, Songs is shown to be autobiographical in nature, one of Blake’s attempts to order and account for the conflicts and crises of his own art and life. Its story is that of an artist’s growth into and out of vision, and of his gradual realization of the dangers and deficiencies of the prophetic mode.

This anthology takes a unique approach to the process of poetry. Each poem included in the book is followed by at least one earlier draft or version of that poem. The reader is thus able to explore the development of the poet’s vision and to make a variety of historical, aesthetic, and intellectual comparisons. The poets represented have been chosen both on the basis of the aesthetic strength of their work and on the grounds of the availability of previous versions of their work. The inclusion of a number of selections by poets ranging from Dickinson and Yeats to Larkin, Plath, and P.K. Page allows readers to focus in some depth on the work of these poets. Though the anthology makes no claim to present a selection fully representative of different eras, regions, or poetic styles, the inclusion of a miscellany as a final chapter adds a substantial measure of breadth to the anthology. Each chapter includes brief commentary by the editors, and questions follow each set of poems.

This volume tells the story of William Blake's literary reception in America and suggests that ideas about Blake's poetry and personality helped shape mythopoeic visions of America from the Abolitionists to the counterculture. It links high and low culture and covers poetry, music, theology, and the novel. American writers have turned to Blake to rediscover the symbolic meaning of their country in times of cataclysmic change, terror, and hope. Blake entered American society when slavery was rife and civil war threatened the fragile experiment of democracy. He found his moment in the mid twentieth-century counterculture as left-wing Americans took refuge in the arts at a time of increasingly reactionary conservatism, vicious racism, pervasive sexism, dangerous nuclear competition, and an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, the fires of Orc raging against the systems of Urizen. Blake's America, as a symbol of cyclical hope and despair, influenced many Americans who saw themselves as continuing the task of prophecy and vision. Blakean forms of bardic song, aphorism, prophecy, and lament became particularly relevant to a literary tradition which centralised the relationship between aspiration and experience. His interrogations of power and privilege, freedom and form resonated with Americans who repeatedly wrestled with the deep ironies of new world symbolism and sought to renew a Whitmanesque ideal of democracy through affection and openness towards alterity.

**LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE** **SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE** PICKED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE TIMES, GUARDIAN, SPECTATOR, DAILY TELEGRAPH, NEW STATESMAN, MAIL ON SUNDAY AND TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'Frances Wilson writes books that blow your hair back. She makes Lawrence live and breathe, annoy and captivate you ... she conjures the past with such clarity and wit and flair that it feels utterly present' Katherine Rundell 'A brilliantly unconventional biography, passionately researched and written with a wild, playful energy' Richard Holmes _____________________ D H Lawrence is no longer censored, but he is still on trial – and we are still unsure what the verdict should be, or even how to describe him. History has remembered him, and not always flatteringly, as a nostalgic modernist, a sexually liberator, a misogynist, a critic of genius, and a sceptic who told us not to look in his novels for 'the old stable ego', yet pioneered the genre we now celebrate as auto-fiction. But where is the real Lawrence in all of this, and how – one hundred years after the publication of Women in Love - can we hear his voice above the noise? Delving into the memoirs of those who both loved and hated him most, Burning Man follows Lawrence from the peninsular underworld of Cornwall in 1915 to post-war Italy to the mountains of New Mexico, and traces the author's footsteps through the pages of his lesser known work. Wilson's triptych of biographical tales present a complex, courageous and often comic fugitive, careering around a world in the grip of apocalypse, in search of utopia; and, in bringing the true Lawrence into sharp focus, shows how he speaks to us now more than ever. 'No biography of Lawrence that I have read comes close to Burning Man' Ferdinand Mount, author of Kiss Myself Goodbye 'The most original voice in life-writing today' Lucasta Miller, author of Keats

Students of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Keats should appreciate these readings of the major romantic poems. The book presents a guide to the various and complex discourses - formalist, psycholanalytic, deconstructive and new historicist - in which these poems have been reviewed.

Walt Whitman burst onto the literary stage raring for a fight with his transatlantic forebears. With the unmetered and unrhymed long lines of Leaves of Grass, he blithely forsook "the old models" declaring that "poems distilled from other poems will probably pass away." In a self-authored but unsigned review of the inaugural 1855 edition, Whitman boasted that its influence-free author "makes no allusions to books or writers; their spirits do not seem to have touched him." There was more than a hint here of a party-crasher's bravado or a new-comer's anxiety about being perceived as derivative. But the giants of British literature were too well established in America to be toppled by Whitman's patronizing "that wonderful little island," he called England-or his frequent assertions that Old World literature was non grata on American soil. As Gary Schmidgall demonstrates, the American bard's manuscripts, letters, prose criticism, and private conversations all reveal that Whitman's negotiation with the literary "big fellows" across the Atlantic was much more nuanced and contradictory than might be supposed. His hostile posture also changed over the decades as the gymnastic rebel transformed into Good Gray Poet, though even late in life he could still crow that his masterwork Leaves of Grass "is an iconoclasm, it starts out to shatter the idols of porcelain." Containing Multitudes explores Whitman's often uneasy embrace of five members of the British literary pantheon: Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Blake, and Wordsworth (five others are treated more briefly: Scott, Carlyle, Tennyson, Wilde, and Swinburne). It also considers how the arcs of their creative careers are often similar to the arc of Whitman's own fifty years of poem-making. Finally, it seeks to illuminate the sometimes striking affinities between the views of these authors and Whitman on human nature and society. Though he was loath to admit it, these authors anticipated much that we now see as quintessentially Whitmanic.

Spine title: Songs of innocence and of experience. Contains critical essays in chronological order of publication.