Songs of Innocence by William Blake

Songs of Innocence by William Blake

William Blake's innovations in engraving techniques brought about his brilliant synthesis of visual and poetic art and signaled the beginning of his famous Illuminated Books, of which the>Songs of Innocence was the first and most popular. Unfortunately, Blake's vision is generally known to the world in amputated form: because of the difficulty and expense of reproducing his original conception, most editions of Blake's work offer only the printed text, with no trace of the visual counterpart so essential to his System.
This new, facsimile edition of the>Songs of Innocence reproduces Blake's color plates in a fashion which the artist himself would have approved. The 31 plates -- printed on facing pages which are the same size of Blake's own first edition -- offer one of the more brightly colored versions of this significant volume, no two copies of which are the same. As a special aid to readers, a typographical reprint of the text of poems follows the plates. Such classic songs as The Lamb and The Chimney Sweeper are now accessible to all in the symbiotic union of poem and picture that is crucial to a total understating of Blake's mind and art.

William Blake's innovations in engraving techniques brought about his brilliant synthesis of visual and poetic art and signaled the beginning of his famous Illuminated Books, of which the>Songs of Innocence was the first and most popular. Unfortunately, Blake's vision is generally known to the world in amputated form: because of the difficulty and expense of reproducing his original conception, most editions of Blake's work offer only the printed text, with no trace of the visual counterpart so essential to his System.
This new, facsimile edition of the>Songs of Innocence reproduces Blake's color plates in a fashion which the artist himself would have approved. The 31 plates -- printed on facing pages which are the same size of Blake's own first edition -- offer one of the more brightly colored versions of this significant volume, no two copies of which are the same. As a special aid to readers, a typographical reprint of the text of poems follows the plates. Such classic songs as The Lamb and The Chimney Sweeper are now accessible to all in the symbiotic union of poem and picture that is crucial to a total understating of Blake's mind and art.

WILLIAM BLAKE was born in London in 1757. He was educated at home and then worked as an apprentice to the engraver James Basire before joining the Royal Academy in 1779. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, and a year later began his career as a poet when he published Poetical Sketches. This was followed by Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), which he also designed and engraved. His other major literary works include The Book of Thel (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1793), Milton (1804-8), and Jerusalem (1804-20). He produced many paintings and engravings during his lifetime. Blake died in 1827.

ALFRED KAZIN was born in Brooklyn in 1915. His first book of criticism, On Native Grounds (1942), was a groundbreaking study of American literature that changed radically our way of looking at it, and established him overnight as a major figure. In a series of books of his own since then, and in many critically edited texts of classic American literary works, he established himself as our preeminent man of letters. He taught widely at Harvard, Smith, Amherst, Hunter College, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and elsewhere. In 1996 he received from the Truman Capote Literary Trust its first Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism (in memory of Newton Arvin). He died in 1998.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780486227641
ISBN 10	0486227642
Title	Songs of Innocence
Author	William Blake
Series	Dover Fine Art History Of Art
Condition	Unavailable
Binding type	Paperback
Publisher	Dover Publications Inc.
Year published	2000-02-01
Number of pages	64
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable