DOWNLOAD PDF A STUDY OF THE ILLUMINATED BOOKS OF WILLIAM BLAKE

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1 Chapter 1 : The Illuminated Blake - William Blake, David V. Erdman - Google Books Note: Citations are based on reference standards. However, formatting rules can vary widely between applications and fields of interest or study. The specific requirements or preferences of your reviewing publisher, classroom teacher, institution or organization should be applied. Early life[ edit ] 28 Broad Street now Broadwick Street in an illustration of Blake was born here and lived here until he was The house was demolished in He was the third of seven children, [14] [15] two of whom died in infancy. Blake started engraving copies of drawings of Greek antiquities purchased for him by his father, a practice that was preferred to actual drawing. The number of prints and bound books that James and Catherine were able to purchase for young William suggests that the Blakes enjoyed, at least for a time, a comfortable wealth. During this period, Blake made explorations into poetry; his early work displays knowledge of Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, and the Psalms. Here, the demiurgic figure Urizen prays before the world he has forged. The Song of Los is the third in a series of illuminated books painted by Blake and his wife, collectively known as the Continental Prophecies. After two years, Basire sent his apprentice to copy images from the Gothic churches in London perhaps to settle a quarrel between Blake and James Parker, his fellow apprentice. His experiences in Westminster Abbey helped form his artistic style and ideas. The Abbey of his day was decorated with suits of armour, painted funeral effigies and varicoloured waxworks. Ackroyd notes that " They teased him and one tormented him so much that Basire knocked the boy off a scaffold to the ground, "upon which he fell with terrific Violence". Reynolds wrote in his Discourses that the "disposition to abstractions, to generalising and classification, is the great glory of the human mind"; Blake responded, in marginalia to his personal copy, that "To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit". They shared radical views, with Stothard and Cumberland joining the Society for Constitutional Information. Blake was reportedly in the front rank of the mob during the attack. The riots, in response to a parliamentary bill revoking sanctions against Roman Catholicism, became known as the Gordon Riots and provoked a flurry of legislation from the government of George III, and the creation of the first police force. Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing Marriage and early career[ edit ] Blake met Catherine Boucher in when he was recovering from a relationship that had culminated in a refusal of his marriage proposal. He recounted the story of his heartbreak for Catherine and her parents, after which he asked Catherine, "Do you pity me? Illiterate, Catherine signed her wedding contract with an X. The original wedding certificate may be viewed at the church, where a commemorative stained-glass window was installed between and Throughout his life she proved an invaluable aid, helping to print his illuminated works and maintaining his spirits throughout numerous misfortunes. Along with William Wordsworth and William Godwin, Blake had great hopes for the French and American revolutions and wore a Phrygian cap in solidarity with the French revolutionaries, but despaired with the rise of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror in France. In Blake composed his unfinished manuscript An Island in the Moon. They seem to have shared some views on sexual equality and the institution of marriage, but there is no evidence proving that they met. The process is also referred to as illuminated printing, and the finished products as illuminated books or prints. Illuminated printing involved writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant medium. Illustrations could appear alongside words in the manner of earlier illuminated manuscripts. He then etched the plates in acid to dissolve the untreated copper and leave the design standing in relief hence the name. This is a reversal of the usual method of etching, where the lines of the design are exposed to the acid, and the plate printed by the intaglio method. Relief etching which Blake referred to as " stereotype " in The Ghost of Abel was intended as a means for producing his illuminated books more quickly than via intaglio. The pages printed from these plates were hand-coloured in water colours and stitched together to form a volume. Such techniques, typical of engraving work of the time, are very different to the much faster and fluid way of drawing on a plate that Blake employed for his relief etching, and indicates why the engravings took so Page 1

2 long to complete. Blake taught Catherine to write, and she helped him colour his printed poems. It was in this cottage that Blake began Milton the title page is dated, but Blake continued to work on it until The preface to this work includes a poem beginning " And did those feet in ancient time ", which became the words for the anthem " Jerusalem ". Over time, Blake began to resent his new patron, believing that Hayley was uninterested in true artistry, and preoccupied with "the meer drudgery of business" E Schofield claimed that Blake had exclaimed "Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves. According to a report in the Sussex county paper, "[T]he invented character of [the evidence] was When Blake learned he had been cheated, he broke off contact with Stothard. The exhibition was designed to market his own version of the Canterbury illustration titled The Canterbury Pilgrims, along with other works. As a result, he wrote his Descriptive Catalogue, which contains what Anthony Blunt called a "brilliant analysis" of Chaucer and is regularly anthologised as a classic of Chaucer criticism. The exhibition was very poorly attended, selling none of the temperas or watercolours. Its only review, in The Examiner, was hostile. Also around this time circa, Blake gave vigorous expression of his views on art in an extensive series of polemical annotations to the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, denouncing the Royal Academy as a fraud and proclaiming, "To Generalize is to be an Idiot". Aged 65, Blake began work on illustrations for the Book of Job, later admired by Ruskin, who compared Blake favourably to Rembrandt, and by Vaughan Williams, who based his ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing on a selection of the illustrations. In later life Blake began to sell a great number of his works, particularly his Bible illustrations, to Thomas Butts, a patron who saw Blake more as a friend than a man whose work held artistic merit; this was typical of the opinions held of Blake throughout his life. Life mask taken in plaster cast in September, Fitzwilliam Museum. Even so, they have earned praise: A gravestone to mark the actual spot was unveiled at a public ceremony on 12 August Eventually, it is reported, he ceased working and turned to his wife, who was in tears by his bedside. Beholding her, Blake is said to have cried, "Stay Kate! Keep just as you are â I will draw your portrait â for you have ever been an angel to me. Gilchrist reports that a female lodger in the house, present at his expiration, said, "I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel. She continued selling his illuminated works and paintings, but entertained no business transaction without first "consulting Mr. Tatham was an Irvingite, one of the many fundamentalist movements of the 19th century, and opposed to any work that smacked of blasphemy. The first was a stone that reads "Near by lie the remains of the poet-painter William Blake â and his wife Catherine Sophia â ". The area had been damaged in the Second World War ; gravestones were removed and a garden was created. The memorial stone, indicating that the burial sites are "nearby", was listed as a Grade II listed structure in In a memorial to Blake and his wife was erected in Westminster Abbey. Blake was concerned about senseless wars and the blighting effects of the Industrial Revolution. Much of his poetry recounts in symbolic allegory the effects of the French and American revolutions. Erdman claims Blake was disillusioned with them, believing they had simply replaced monarchy with irresponsible mercantilism and notes Blake was deeply opposed to slavery, and believes some of his poems read primarily as championing " free love " have had their anti-slavery implications short-changed. Visionary Anarchist by Peter Marshall, classified Blake and his contemporary William Godwin as forerunners of modern anarchism. William Blake and the Moral Law, shows how far he was inspired by dissident religious ideas rooted in the thinking of the most radical opponents of the monarchy during the English Civil War. The Vintage anthology of Blake edited by Patti Smith focuses heavily on the earlier work, as do many critical studies such as William Blake by D. The earlier work is primarily rebellious in character and can be seen as a protest against dogmatic religion especially notable in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which the figure represented by the "Devil" is virtually a hero rebelling against an imposter authoritarian deity. In later works, such as Milton and Jerusalem, Blake carves a distinctive vision of a humanity redeemed by self-sacrifice and forgiveness, while retaining his earlier negative attitude towards what he felt was the rigid and morbid authoritarianism of traditional religion. This renunciation of the sharper dualism of Marriage of Heaven and Hell is evidenced in particular by the humanisation of the character of Urizen in the later works. Murry characterises the later Blake as having found "mutual understanding" and Page 2

3 "mutual forgiveness". The 19th-century "free love" movement was not particularly focused on the idea of multiple partners, but did agree with Wollstonecraft that state-sanctioned marriage was "legal prostitution" and monopolistic in character. It has somewhat more in common with early feminist movements [77] particularly with regard to the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, whom Blake admired. Blake was critical of the marriage laws of his day, and generally railed against traditional Christian notions of chastity as a virtue. Poems such as "Why should I be bound to thee, O my lovely Myrtle-tree? Visions of the Daughters of Albion is widely though not universally read as a tribute to free love since the relationship between Bromion and Oothoon is held together only by laws and not by love. For Blake, law and love are opposed, and he castigates the "frozen marriage-bed". In Visions, Blake writes: Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot, is bound In spells of law to one she loathes? Foster Damon noted that for Blake the major impediments to a free love society were corrupt human nature, not merely the intolerance of society and the jealousy of men, but the inauthentic hypocritical nature of human communication. Some poems from this period warn of dangers of predatory sexuality such as The Sick Rose. Berger believes the young Blake placed too much emphasis on following impulses, [95] and that the older Blake had a better formed ideal of a true love that sacrifices self. However, the late poems also place a greater emphasis on forgiveness, redemption, and emotional authenticity as a foundation for relationships. Religious views[ edit ] This section possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. This image depicts Copy D of the illustration currently held at the British Museum. His view of orthodoxy is evident in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Therein, Blake lists several Proverbs of Hell, among which are the following: Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion. As the catterpillar [ sic ] chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys. God wants not Man to Humble himself 55â 61, Eâ 20 For Blake, Jesus symbolises the vital relationship and unity between divinity and humanity: Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus. Within these he describes a number of characters, including "Urizen", "Enitharmon", "Bromion" and "Luvah". His mythology seems to have a basis in the Bible as well as Greek and Norse mythology, [97] [98] and it accompanies his ideas about the everlasting Gospel. Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed and governd their Passions or have No Passions but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors. Page 3

4 Chapter 2 : Sturgis Antiques & Collectables See the Best Books of the Month Looking for something great to read? Browse our editors' picks for the best books of the month in fiction, nonfiction, mysteries, children's books, and much more. They showcase the poetic genius that has made him a focus of both study and renown long after his death. They also exhibit his equally important artistic contribution and Blake was uniquely in control of these poetic works. In, when Blake first began producing his illuminated poems, developed his own artistic medium: He began with a piece of engraved copper that he etched himself. By applying various inks and watercolors by hand, using small brushes and pens to write his text backwards, Blake could produce these elaborate images that were tailored to his individual poems. Because his engraving style allowed him to reuse the engraved plates, and to apply new inks and paints if he so desired, Blake could continuously reproduce new and unique works. His relief etching allowed him to fill every role of the creation process: Never before had a poet united the various stages of book production in this manner; and applying the tools of drawing, engraving, and painting freed Blake to think in new ways and unite invention and execution in methods that conventional printmaking had never made possible. Each text represents the various engraving methods that Blake utilized throughout his career to depict his poetic masterpieces. The digital reproduction housed in the Special Collections department comes to us from the Trianon Press, who have produced some of the most detailed facsimiles that are available to scholars. Consisting of 31 plates total, this illuminated text showcases simpler water-color washes. The coloring for these works became far more elaborate after Only five copies are known to have been produced by Blake. Jerusalem showcases many of the qualities that set Blake apart from both traditional poets and artists. An example of this can be seen in Jerusalem. Once the original engraving was made, different paints could be applied to it at any time to achieve a vastly different illumination. An early edition might feature images colored with blues and greens. A later one might have images engraved with pinks and oranges. In addition to allowing Blake to remake his illuminations with relative ease, scholars are also able to pinpoint exactly when a specific copy was printed, and from what original edition it comes from. The unique color-printing method Blake employed for his illuminated book were rendered in opaque pigments that he crafted himself. As a result of both the engraving method and ink choices, it is very difficult to produce satisfactory facsimiles, as is the case with the Book of Urizen. This edition features plates outlined with orange-brown ink. The images themselves are done in saturated water-colors and even gold on many of the plates. As is the case with many of his illuminated books, the number and arrangement of plates can vary; our edition contains 27 plates. This particular facsimile represents the highest quality put forth by the Trianon Press. Of all reproductions made, this one is bested suited for instructional and research use. The Book of Ahania represents one of the final illuminated poems produced by Blake. Blake only ever completed one copy of this text, never included it in his list of productions, and did not dispense it to a customer or patron, as far as we know. Based on the themes found in this text, scholars have generally agreed that Ahania continues and concludes the creation myth that Blake began in the Book of Urizen. The most accessible way to view these poems in facsimile form. His relief etching method presents a rare challenge to properly reproduce poems such as Jerusalem and the Book of Urizen. As a result, many facsimiles are not suitable for teaching or research. Fortunately, the various facsimiles in Special Collections are reproduced from the Rosenwald Collection, located in the Library of Congress. They represent some of the finest facsimiles ever produced, crafted by the Trianon Press; and they are ideal for anyone who wishes to study Blake and his illuminated works. Page 4

5 Chapter 3 : The Complete Illuminated Books by William Blake A Study of the Illuminated Books of William Blake: Poet, Printer, Prophet [William] Keynes, Geoffrey [Blake, 59 Color Illustrations / Plates] on blog.quintoapp.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. 4to hardcover w/dj. A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. Princeton University Press, Mitchell begins with a theoretical discussion of the illuminated format and then, contending that each illuminated poem is an organic unit and develops its own particular relationship of text and design, proceeds to detailed readings of three works: This is a well-chosen series for several reasons. First, we see Blake in the early, middle, and late stages of his poetic career. Second, we see three critical developments in his mythology: And third, we see three different styles of illumination: Basically, Mitchell has a contemporary and, I feel, sound concept of Blake. His Blake is not the Piper of Innocence or Rintrah raging in the wilderness or the visionary vitalist Oothoon. His is Blake the artistâ and the artist perhaps ultimately more as formalist, maker of art-objects, than as Romantic hero, although the latter is by no means absent. Above all, this is a gentle, tolerant Blake; the Blakean idea that prevails in this book is Forgiveness. For such designs, says Mitchell, the reader must supply his own poem. Using the traditional iconography of St. Christopher, Mitchell interprets the picture as a symbol of reader and poet, both of them burdened with the prophetic task of making meaning in a spectral world. The second way is the kind of counterpoint that appears in America where Blake uses a picture of a Urizenic Angel of Albion to illustrate a speech by Orc and one of Orc to illustrate a passage about the Angels; the result is a composite drama in which the aged oppressor is transformed into his youthful opponent and perhaps vice versa. He follows a questionable tradition in associating the embracing figures at the bottom of the plate with the Memorable Fancy in which the angel, embracing the fire, turns into a devil. The trouble here is that Mitchell uncritically accepts a text which, as Bloom has pointed out, collapses into incoherence unless read ironically, for if the two boys are freed in heaven from their bodies, as the poem says they are, then the speaker can no longer use his blackness to guard the white boy. Illumination pictorializes the poem; however, in the act of interpretation it is the words that assume primacy: In effect, illumination functions as a strategy to suppress, even conceal, the words, in contrast with the exposure of the printed page. He shows how Blakean practice contradicts point by point the principles of the ut pictura poesis tradition, in which the imagination is given a visual analogy. Blake emerges convincingly here as an anti-perspectival, anti-pictorial artist; for him poetry and painting, far from seeking analogous methods, each have to find individual ways of being visionary. But with the text attacking objective time and the designs attacking objective space, both cooperate in reshaping the perceptual world. Mitchell valuably places the relation of text and design within the context of Blakean dialectic in general. The apparent schism between poetry and painting is simultaneous with that between soul and body, intellect and sense, and, most radically, male and female; and thus composite-art criticism leads us straight into the central Blakean problem of dualism. But what type of internal aggression and self-division is revealed in the spectacle of a Blake who rebels even against himself? What impelled Blake to develop two artistic gifts to an unmatched degree and bring them together in a complex double art? Doubleness in Blake seems anterior to any of its formal and thematic expressions. Yet we also see Blake struggling to transform wrath and conflict into non-destructive modes of doubleness: The first is the relationship of color and line. In the theory and the poetic mythology, outline is permanent, male, Los, the naked body, while color is evanescent, female, Enitharmon, the garment, but what we actually see is a dialectic of the two, similar to the interplay of text and design. A second pictorial feature is the use of the human body as an organizational factor in composition. The body appears in a continuum of postures from the contracted, oppressed crouching form to the expansive, risen, leaping or flying form. A third, and especially interesting, pictorial feature is that linear composition in Blake is based upon four forms, used either in repetition or interaction within the frame: Here I think Mitchell teaches us to look at Blakean designs in a useful new way. The spiral and S-curve are generally associated with expansion in subject matter and the circle and inverted U with contraction. Furthermore, Page 5

6 working from recurrent poetic motifs, Mitchell associates the spiral with the ear, the S-curve with the tongue, the circle with the eye, and the inverted U with the nose; he thus sees sensory opening and art work as parallel in that both are windows to be seen through. He develops in detail the spiral, as vine, scroll, serpent, whirlpool, and, particularly, vortex. The vortex, in his analysis of this complex and much-analyzed figure, is a gateway into a new level of perception, either upwards or downwards, and also an image of oscillation between a vision of the object as it is and a vision of the object as we see it. This latter formulation is fruitful, and the interpretation that depends upon it of the vortex passage in Milton is excellent. But one problem is that Mitchell speaks of poetic accounts of the vortex in visual terms even though he associates the vortex, together with all other variants of the spiral, with the ear. Relatedly, the two great descriptions of the vortex, in Milton and The Four Zoas, both concern acts of falling, whereas the spiral is usually associated with ascent. I would argue that we have to separate the vortex from the other spiral variants and regard it sui generis as an image of visual experience. Perhaps we fall through the vortex of the perspectival eye and rise through the spiral of the ear. The theoretical discussion, both in its many local observations and in its general portrayal of a dramatic, dialectical composite art is on the whole an excellent piece of Blake criticism. In his argument the work, although apparently straightforward, is permeated by ambiguities in both text and design. Most notably, it is framed by two enigmas: This reading is lively and, to a certain extent, helpful. It is true that the world Thel rejects is a world of ambiguity and uncertainty, as evidenced by the famous paradoxes of the body in the speech from the grave. But to make this general point, it is not necessary to force everything in the poem into ambivalent form. The closing picture of the serpent, for example, does not seem to me a case of terminal ambiguity. While a number of ways of looking at it are possible, they are not equally convincing. But in treating aesthetic ambiguity we have to distinguish between possibilities that are equal and possibilities that are more and less likely, between the mutual refutations of skeptical form and the richness of an image surrounded by auras of qualifying connotation. The same is true of the motto. The questioner who does not know how to reply is no hero for Blake. These are certainly judgments with moral implication, and I also agree with them. We need to distinguish between the narrowly moralistic judgments of conventional good and evil, on the one hand, and psychological, philosophical, or imaginative judgments on the other. Blake wants to wean us from the former to the latter. To condemn Thel moralistically is beside the point, but so is merely forgiving her. Instead, the poem forces us to understand her both analytically and sympathetically as a failure in the same way that we must analyze the poignant failures of many of the characters in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. It is not precisely that we must identify with Thel, as Mitchell argues, but that we must apprehend her cathartically as that part of ourselves that regresses when faced with the challenges and dilemmas of Experience and of adult self-consciousness. Mitchell seems to take their acceptance of death as part of a greater harmony as an ideal recognition that Thel is unable to achieve, and he also says that their mode of being, as portrayed in the pictures, is no different from hers. But their pictorial smallness in relation to her is, I feel, indicative that their mode of being is indeed different. Further, the story of the poem is in part the story of the aborted emergence of a human consciousness from its identification with nature in the state of Innocence. The comforters cannot really help Thel because they do not know death as a self-conscious human mind knows it. They know only the cycles, metamorphoses, and ultimate unity of nature. The comforters urge acceptance of the given body of nature; Thel resists it in the form of chastity and denial of death; ultimately Blake was to urge resistance in the form of eros and art. I might add that Mitchell is mistaken to say that the poem deals primarily with death. What we have when the voice from the grave speaks about sex is a precise conjunction of sex and death. What Thelâ whom, as Mitchell notes, we first see on the title-page gazing ambivalently at two flower-people making loveâ hears from her grave-plot is, in essence, a warning that concern with sex can lead to death, and a confirmation of the anxiety that sex and death are the same. Thel is an Oedipus who cannot answer the riddles of the sphinx. Blake chooses a childlike female hero to express a failure to overcome castration anxiety, a failure to assume a phallus, that is, emotionally acknowledge and accept it. It is not for nothing that a blind moleâ that is, a blinded, or castrated, Oedipus-surrogateâ appears Page 6

7 in the motto as a potential guide to the depths of Experience. Her non-sequitur reveals her inability to emerge from childhood, as a nuptial relationship with God is translated into a filial one. The chapter on The Book of Urizen is much more successful in its entirety. Metaphorically, Mitchell writes, the radical separation of text and design, including a tendency to divide the plate into distinct pictorial and poetic areas rather than letting them interpenetrate, is appropriate to a theme of division and isolation, to a story in which Urizen separates from the Eternals, Los from Urizen, Enitharmon from Los, and Orc from the last two, and to a set of pictures in which the human form appears locked in its own solitude, even when other humans do happen to be present. The split between Urizen and the Eternals is not, Mitchell shows, a schism of fallen and unfallen but of one sensibility into reason and emotion. Far from healing the schism, however, Los, in his divided allegiance, is himself divided into male and female. Los is trying to recover a lost sense of radical humanity that in existentialism, as well as in more recent French thought, would be regarded as a religious illusion, a myth of Presence. Once again, we are being weaned from the categories of good and evil, and now an ostensible villain, Urizen, turns out not to be quite so bad after all. The designs portray him alternately as a titanically tragic figure and as a laughable one. It is certainly true that Urizen is not synonymous with Nobodaddy; rather, he represents an internalization of that more blatant villain. Mitchell helps us sophisticate our response to Urizen, but his idea that Blake criticizes Milton for assigning all moral virtue to one party and suppressing his sympathy for the other is not the best formulation of the problem since this involves a redistribution of good and evil, not an advance beyond them. Nor is Mitchell helpful when he defends Urizen by saying that his oppressive One Law is after all motivated by a desire for peace, love, and forgiveness, for the passage in which this point is made is clearly satirical in structure. Mitchell extends his point about Urizen in a provocative discussion of the relations between Urizen, Los, and Blake himself. Most strikingly, the title-page portrayal of Urizen, seated before a pair of tombstone-decalogue tablets and ambidextrously copying from a book half-hidden by his beard, can be read as a self-parody of the double artist. Blake tends to use humor in a Rabelaisian way to enhance his romantic conception of himself and his work, rather than in a Byronic way to qualify or even puncture it. Another fact about Blake that we have to face is that he does have a titanic sense of himselfâ as he does of mankind in general. His tongue-in-cheek humor tells us proleptically that he is aware of his own egomania, enjoys it, and is in creative control of it. Lawmaker and artist, both writers, are antitheses; further-more, the Urizen on the title-page is a copyist, while in the narrative he is a solipsistic originator, and these are two opposite dangers for the artist. Once again I find Mitchell collapsing an important distinction. Getting away from a narrow moralism of vice and virtue is not the equivalent of moral relativism. But he does, unlike Shakespeare, insistently call upon us to behave and perceive in certain ways; imagination is a moral category for him, and he demands that we expand our faculties to the fullest extent in a challenging and intense ethic of art and vision. Shakespeare, like Chaucer, wants to give us insight into reality. Blake, like Milton and Spenser, wants to transform reality; they are writers of the Human, as opposed to the human. However many crossovers there might be, these are distinct styles of imagination, and much is lost by assimilating them. The Jerusalem chapter is largely concerned to develop an accurate structural description of the poem. The poem thus repeats itself, adapting its theme to its different classes of readers. Chapter II addresses the Jews, assigning to them the special error of patriarchy and masculine obsession; the chapter accordingly concentrates on moral self-righteousness, especially regarding chastity, and on the development of the spectre, a male ego that worships a female world. The pictures in Jerusalem have a special iconographical complexity, and in reading them Mitchell is often able to define an essential Blakean type of ambiguity more thoroughly than I have ever seen it done elsewhere. Page 7

8 Chapter 4 : Geoffrey Keynes - Wikipedia Home > Between the Covers- Rare Books, Inc. ABAA > A Study of the Illuminated Books of William Blake: Poet, Printer A Study of the Illuminated Books of William Blake: Poet, Printer, Prophet by (, William). They showcase the poetic genius that has made him a focus of both study and renown long after his death. They also exhibit his equally important artistic contribution and Blake was uniquely in control of these poetic works. In, when Blake first began producing his illuminated poems, developed his own artistic medium: He began with a piece of engraved copper that he etched himself. By applying various inks and watercolors by hand, using small brushes and pens to write his text backwards, Blake could produce these elaborate images that were tailored to his individual poems. Because his engraving style allowed him to reuse the engraved plates, and to apply new inks and paints if he so desired, Blake could continuously reproduce new and unique works. His relief etching allowed him to fill every role of the creation process: Never before had a poet united the various stages of book production in this manner; and applying the tools of drawing, engraving, and painting freed Blake to think in new ways and unite invention and execution in methods that conventional printmaking had never made possible. Each text represents the various engraving methods that Blake utilized throughout his career to depict his poetic masterpieces. The digital reproduction housed in the Special Collections department comes to us from the Trianon Press, who have produced some of the most detailed facsimiles that are available to scholars. Consisting of 31 plates total, this illuminated text showcases simpler water-color washes. The coloring for these works became far more elaborate after Only five copies are known to have been produced by Blake. Once the original engraving was made, different paints could be applied to it at any time to achieve a vastly different illumination. An early edition might feature images colored with blues and greens. A later one might have images engraved with pinks and oranges. In addition to allowing Blake to remake his illuminations with relative ease, scholars are also able to pinpoint exactly when a specific copy was printed, and from what original edition it comes from. The unique color-printing method Blake employed for his illuminated book were rendered in opaque pigments that he crafted himself. This edition features plates outlined with orange-brown ink. The images themselves are done in saturated water-colors and even gold on many of the plates. As is the case with many of his illuminated books, the number and arrangement of plates can vary; our edition contains 27 plates. This particular facsimile represents the highest quality put forth by the Trianon Press. Of all reproductions made, this one is bested suited for instructional and research use. Blake only ever completed one copy of this text, never included it in his list of productions, and did not dispense it to a customer or patron, as far as we know. The most accessible way to view these poems in facsimile form. As a result, many facsimiles are not suitable for teaching or research. Fortunately, the various facsimiles in Special Collections are reproduced from the Rosenwald Collection, located in the Library of Congress. They represent some of the finest facsimiles ever produced, crafted by the Trianon Press; and they are ideal for anyone who wishes to study Blake and his illuminated works. Page 8

9 Chapter 5 : William Blake - Wikipedia To ask other readers questions about A Study Of The Illuminated Books Of William Blake, please sign up. I like the illustrations almost as much as I like the poetry. Blake had a rich poetic palette to work with. He had visions that were important to his work and added depth to his I began seeking out the illuminated books of William Blake almost as soon as I was introduced to his poetry around or He had visions that were important to his work and added depth to his vision. He also had his own mythology that developed throughout his writing career that seemed to be similar in purpose to the desire of Tolkien to create a mythology for England. Also, today Blake would have been a hard core socialist or communist. He condemns industrialism and speaks for the poor and weak. Blake was a printer by trade. He invented a process in which three colors could be printed onto the page mechanically. For his illuminated books he would then water color the rest of what needed to be added by hand. What do I like about William Blake? He was a visionary. I admire a person who has seen something and developed it into a coherent body of art. There are icons in his illuminated books that are so simple that an untrained person could do something similar and then on the same page or in a Bible illustration he would create something that requires the craft of a great artist. It always struck me as odd that both would be included. I also wonder what the purpose of that weird blend of simple and sophisticated was intended to do. His illuminated books have what appears to be hand-written text interrupted or punctuated with the small icons and then decorated with illustrations reminds me of flyers I saw during the s left around the University. The person who made the photocopied flyers wrote pages of diatribe in perfectly square and neat hand-writing on blank paper. The diatribes warned against the actions of the "RoboCop" who was acting on behalf of large corporations to keep the populous under control. The writer claimed antennas where sending mind-control messages into the population. There was also something about a berm that used to be north of town. All of this fit our town into a larger world of conspiracy. Small icons worked into the text of the diatribe, small diagrams of antennas and airplanes, and sometimes the logos of the offending corporations, what ever was being described in the text. Each diatribe would end with a list of contact numbers where a person could report information if they saw the RoboCop in our area. The one that always struck me was a phone number to the Oklahoma City stockyards. This part of the list claimed they had a publication providing information and gave a citation. When this person was active I ran across a couple of these diatribes. When the police asked for them I turned them in without making copies. A policeman later told me that they identified the author, interviewed her extensively and determined that she was harmless. I think of this incident every time I look at the illuminated work of William Blake. Polypi, vegetating couches, emanations Will I ever learn to bow to the great weight of History and Literature, to recognize my agonizing lack of context and knowledge, and grant myself permission to have something distilled for me rather than read it myself? I had thought William Blake was a poet who quite ingeniously crafted his own illustrated pamphlets; I was not prepared for the profound extent of his universe and his madness, and have subsequently been driven to keep searching for some great scholar to please, please spell out f Will I ever learn to bow to the great weight of History and Literature, to recognize my agonizing lack of context and knowledge, and grant myself permission to have something distilled for me rather than read it myself? I had thought William Blake was a poet who quite ingeniously crafted his own illustrated pamphlets; I was not prepared for the profound extent of his universe and his madness, and have subsequently been driven to keep searching for some great scholar to please, please spell out for me a line-by-line well, not quite interpretation of What. I may have passed my eyes over every page of this extensive volume, but I imagine my perusal of Blake must continue on into the Future, until someone will tell me what exactly he thinks a Polypus is, or what makes a thing or person be described as Vegetating, or how it came to be that Couches feature so prominently in his otherwise quite natural works. I have only begun to investigate, but if someone could direct me to a glossary, or a character map, or an in-depth dictionary of allusion, or even a summary of what is HAPPENING in these colossal works of Page 9

10 exquisite insanity, because the explanations on Wikipedia are sparse to nonexistent, and the summaries only further serve to prove to me that What The Hell. In a way he makes me hate modern society, if only because of my spurious notion that were he alive today he would just be the brooding heartthrob frontman of some unlistenable band with minute-long songs suffused with their own convoluted mythology. Chapter 6 : A Study Of The Illuminated Books Of William Blake: Poet, Printer, Prophet by William Blake WILLIAM, POET, PRINTER, PROPHET: A STUDY OF THE ILLUMINATED BOOKS OF WILLIAM Poet, Printer, Prophet by Keynes, Geoffrey, and Wolf, Edwin and a great selection of similar Used, New and Collectible Books available now at blog.quintoapp.com Chapter 7 : William Blake Book of Postcards In his Illuminated Books, William Blake combined text and imagery on a single page in a way that had not been done since the Middle Ages. For Blake, religion and politics, intellect and emotion, mind and body were both unified and in conflict with each other: his work is expressive of his personal mythology, and his methods of conveying it were integral to its meaning. Page 10