Selected Poems (Hardbound - 2018)

The book contains Blake's poems and songs. "Poetical Sketches" is the first collection of poetry and prose by William Blake, written between 1769 and 1777. It contains poems like "To Spring", "To Winter", "To the Evening Star", and some songs. "All Religions are One" is a series of philosophical aphorisms. This along with "There is No Natural Religion" represents Blake's first successful attempt to combine image and text via relief etching, and are thus the earliest of his illuminated manuscripts.

"Songs of Innocence and of Experience" is an illustrated collection of poems which appeared in two phases. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William Blake himself in 1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume entitled Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. "Innocence" and "Experience" are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton's existential-mythic states of "Paradise" and the "Fall". Blake's categories are modes of perception that tend to coordinate with a chronology that would become standard in Romanticism--childhood is a state of protected innocence rather than original sin, but not immune to the fallen world and its institutions. This world sometimes impinges on childhood itself, and in any event becomes known through "experience", a state of being marked by the loss of childhood vitality, by fear and inhibition, by social and political corruption, and by the manifold oppression of Church, State, and the ruling classes. The volume's "Contrary States" are sometimes signalled by patently repeated or contrasted titles: "The Little Black Boy"; "The Blossom"; "The Chimney Sweeper"; "The Little Boy Lost"; "The Little Boy Found"; "Laughing Song"; "A Cradle Song"; "The Divine Image"; and "On Another's Sorrow". The stark simplicity of these poems shows Blake's acute sensibility to the realities of poverty and exploitation.

"Notebook" contains autograph drafts by Blake, of poems and prose with numerous sketches and designs, mostly in pencil. Also included in the book are poems like "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"; "America"; "The Songs of Los"; and "The Pickering MS", to make the book a collection of Blake's major poems.

William Blake (1757–1827) was an English painter, poet and printmaker. He is considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. In 2002, Blake was placed at number 38 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. Except for a period of three years spent in Felpham, Blake lived in London for his entire life. Nevertheless, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich oeuvre, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God" or "human existence itself".

Although criticised by some contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high esteem by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His poetry has been characterised as part of the Romantic movement and as "Pre-Romantic". Influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, he turned against the Church of England but respected the Bible. He was influenced by thinkers like Emanuel Swendenborg. Blake had a complex relationship with Enlightenment philosophy. Owing to his visionary religious beliefs, he opposed the Newtonian view of the universe. This mindset is reflected in Blake's poem "Jerusalem". Because of the diversity of his views, critics found it difficult to classify him as a thinker.

Blake also experimented with relief etching, a method he used to produce most of his books, paintings, pamphlets and poems. The process is also referred to as illuminated printing, and the finished products as illuminated books or prints, which involved writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant medium.

The 19th-century scholar, William Rossetti called him 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". Lucas said of him: "Shall I call him artist or genius–or mystic–or madman?" Samuel Taylor Coleridge considered Blake "a man of genius", and Wordsworth made his own copies of several of Blake's songs. As a Romantic writer he has exerted the most powerful influence on the 20th and the 21st centuries.