This first comprehensive selection of Blake's poetry and prose in modernized form with complete annotation fully represents his extraordinarily diverse achievements and breaks new ground in elucidating his powerful prose. Organized by genre and subject for easy accessibility to the student and first-time reader, as well as to the specialist, the anthology includes nearly all of Blake's poetry and prose works and some of his letters. The epic narratives Milton and Jerusalem are reproduced in full, and an index of Blakean names and motifs is included.

William Blake is one of England's most original artists whose works aim to liberate imaginative energies. This volume contains his greatest writings and a generous selection from the Prophetic Books including Milton and Jerusalem.

William Blake is one of England’s most fascinating writers; he was not only a groundbreaking poet, but also a painter, engraver, radical, and mystic. Although Blake was dismissed as an eccentric by his contemporaries, his powerful and richly symbolic poetry has been a fertile source of inspiration to the many writers and artists who have followed in his footsteps. In this collection Patti Smith brings together her personal favorites of Blake’s poems, including the complete Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, to give a singular picture of this unique genius, whom she calls in her moving introduction “the spiritual ancestor” of generations of poets.

Blake occupies a very special place in the pantheon of English Romanticism: just as innovative and brilliant as a painter and draughtsman as in the field of poetry, he created works that are often difficult to categorize and that, while harking back to a classical and biblical past, also look forward to the future – with authors such as T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and the Beat poets among his many modern admirers. This volume includes an essential selection of Blake's poetry, from the lesser-known Poetical Sketches to his celebrated Songs of Innocence and of Experience and the “prophetic works” inspired by the French Revolution, covering over two decades of poetical activity and displaying the author's originality and independence of mind at their sparkling best.

Features 104 of Blake's poems: "A Song of Liberty," "The Argument," "Proverbs of Hell," "The Mental Traveller," "The Land of Dreams," "To the Evening Star" and many more.