A NEw YoRK TIMES NoTABLE BooK A BIOGRAPHY "[ACKROYD IS] A BRILLIANT GUIDE AND INTERPRETER." -The New York Times Book Review PETER ACI<ROYD
"MARVELOUS... A first-rate biography of an extraordinary man." -The Wall Street Journal "SUPERB... Ackroyd writes with clarity and ease: His book is consistently intelligent, entertaining and affectionate. One closes its pages full of admiration for Blake and eager to study his pictures and read his poetry... Ackroyd emphasizes Blake the visionary Londoner, like Turner or Dickens, and convincingly relates the poet's work to the social upheavals of his time... Above all, [he] makes Blake live for the modern reader." -The Washington Post Book World "LYRICAL AND ILLUMINATING... I Ackroyd is a masterly storyteller and interpreter of Blake's writing and art." -Chicago Tribune "THE WORK OF A WRITER AT THE PEAK OF HIS LITERARY POWERS... It is one of the great strengths of Ackroyd's writing that he reminds us that every individual life and cast of mind has a tradition behind it, a context of other lives and minds which is half forgotten or not remembered at all. As a writer, he is always letting his bucket deeper and deeper down the historical well." -The New Yorker In addition to his acclaimed biographies, Peter Ackroyd is the author of nine novels, most recently The Trial of Elizabeth Cree. He lives in London. @) Ballantine/37611/$18.00 Visit our World Wide Web page at http://www.randomhouse.com Cover printed in USA I 9 780345 376114
"EVOCATIVE... ACKROYD'S GENIUS SHINES... [He] translates the visual medium of painting into an aural one... Readers almost feel what Blake felt when he saw the visions." -The Virginian-Pilot "Passionate and perceptive... Fresh and revealing... The events of Blake's life are radiantly resurrected here... The characterization of Blake himself... has never been so fully accomplished." -The Miami Herald "Ackroyd-the quirky and brilliant biographer (Dickens) and novelist (Chatterton)... plays with the oddities of time and reality... [A] respectful treatment of Blake's visionary sensibility." -San Francisco Chronicle "Splendid... Peter Ackroyd humanizes Blake as few other biographers have done." -St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Moving... Combining meticulous scholarship with uncanny psychological insight; this marvelously illustrated biography presents [Blake] as a prescient social critic who, long before Freud, saw warfare as a form of repressed sexuality, and whose prophetic epic poems offer a cogent vision of humanity's spiritual renewal." -Publishers Weekly (starred review) Please turn the page for more reviews....
"ALWAYS ABSORBING... ADMIRABLE." -Daily News "Refreshing... Ackroyd elucidates so well what the craftsman in Blake sets out to accomplish in each painting and poem that we are given the chance to appreciate Blake's genius in its most exalted form... The book's superb reproductions convey some of the originals' intensity, supporting Ackroyd's stylish narrative." -Sunday Oregonian "Fascinating... Peter Ackroyd is England's most imaginative biographer." -The Baltimore Sun "A work so sensitive to its subject, it seems to have conjured [Blake] from the beyond." -Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "[An] intelligently researched and highly sensitive biography... [Ackroyd] offers adept insights into Blake's influences and work, art, and poetry (which he rightfully shows as inherently linked).... Ackroyd has managed to merge the engaging details of Blake's surroundings and his interior life into an unusually comprehensive and believable portrait of a tremendously gifted and frequently misunderstood poet, artist, and visionary." -Booklist (starred review)
BLAKE
ALSo BY PETER AcKROYD Fiction The Great Fire of London The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde Hawksmoor Chatterton First Light English Music The House of Doctor Dee Dan Lena and the Limehouse Den The Trial of Elizabeth Cree Biography T. S. Eliot Dickens Poetry The Diversions of Purley Criticism Notes for a New Culture
BLAKE PETER AcKROYD BALLANTINE BOOKS NEW YORK
Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as "unsold or destroyed" and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it. Copyright i 995 by Peter Ackroyd All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Sinclair-Stevenson, London, in 1995. http:/ /www.randomhouse.com Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-93 784 ISBN: 345-37611-0 Cover design by David Stevenson Cover art: William Blake, And God Blessed the Seventh Day and Sanctified It. Detail of right side on front cover, detail of left side on back cover. Courtesy of Bridgeman/ Art Resource, NY This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America First Ballantine Books Edition: July 1997 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
IN MEMORY of BRIAN KuHN
0 how couldst thou deform those beautiful proportions Of life & person for as the Person so is his life proportiond WILLIAM BLAKE Qui n' a pas l' esprit de son age De son age a tout le malheur VoLTAIRE