College Literature

Mary Lynn Johnson’s and John E. Grant’s update of their 1979 Norton critical edition of Blake’s Poetry and Designs represents a significant step forward in the presentation of Blake’s work to the reading public. Consistent with newer Norton editions, Blake’s Poetry and Designs is more compact, colorful, and better typeset than the first edition. It also incorporates significant updates to its content, now arranged with the most widely circulated editions of Blake in mind: while their 1979 edition followed the chronological arrangement of Keynes’s edition of Blake—which had been the standard edition of Blake since 1925—the new edition follows the now-standard Erdman edition, placing the text of the illuminated books first and following it with manuscript material, marginalia, and then letters. However, the effect of this change is to shift from a study of Blake oriented around the development of his thought through time to a perhaps too focused emphasis upon the illuminated books.

This emphasis is reflected in the new edition in its inclusion of all of Jerusalem. The first edition had less than half of what is now considered Blake’s great work, so that all of Blake’s illuminated books are now presented in a Norton Critical Edition. Johnson and Grant expand For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise from only the concluding “To the Accuser Who is the God of This World” to the complete text, add Blake’s marginalia to Spurzheim’s Observations on Insanity, and approximately double the text of Blake’s letter to Thomas Butts of 26 April 1803. But where the editors giveth, the publishers taketh away: as a partial trade-off for the inclusion of all of Jerusalem, the editors cut all of Hayley’s letters from 1800 and approximately ten pages from their selections from Blake’s notebook, which is no longer thematically organized. The first edition’s sections on “Drafts” and “Love” from the notebook suffered the fewest cuts, while its section on “Visions” is about half its previous length and “Art and Artists” is barely represented at all.

The net effect of these cuts is to reduce the notebook to a reading companion to the illuminated books emphasizing the themes of sex, love, and vision, a reasonable decision given the new edition’s greater emphasis on the [End Page 229] illuminated books and the consequent cuts. Johnson and Grant are not as concerned with separating Blake’s poetry from his prose as Erdman was, but I wish they had chosen to follow their original chronological arrangement of Blake’s work. As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of Erdman’s New and Revised Edition of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, a chronological presentation of Blake’s poetry and prose would now be a departure from Erdman’s norm, one conducive to the new approaches to Blake’s material which have been increasingly historically oriented.

One radical departure from all prior presentations of Blake is this edition’s reliance upon The William Blake Archive for transcriptions of the illuminated books (Erdman’s text, cross referenced with originals, is used for Blake’s other works). The William Blake Archive serves as an online companion to this edition, and is continually referenced in notes and introductory material. Reliance upon the archive for transcriptions brings readers closer to Blake’s self-published illuminated works as they appear in the material objects he actually produced. In the past, readers of Blake did not read Blake, but one editor’s ideal text developed from collating a number of variant prints. The new Norton edition for the first time presents the particularities of Blake’s individual manuscripts, bringing the reader as close as possible to Blake’s text as it would be read in one of the illuminated works themselves. The temptation to revise and correct Blake is for most editors of Blake difficult to overcome, but the Grants resist as much as possible.

This edition’s most striking feature is the quality of the color reproductions of Blake’s visual art. The Grants were only able to include sixteen color illustrations in this edition, half the number of the first. However, Blake’s illustrations are now printed on non-glossy, cream colored paper, which in some instances blends very closely with the color and texture of Blake’s own paper. This choice of paper combined with Norton’s investment in high quality color reproduction allows Blake’s colors to leap as strikingly from the pages of Blake’s Poetry and Designs as they do when seen in person, precisely what they failed to do when they have to compete with light reflected from glossy paper of the older Norton editions (and while the color pages were prone to falling out in the older editions, the new paper binds well). Despite one glitch in the reproduction of the title page to Europe (copy K), there’s simply no going back to glossy reproductions of Blake’s art. In addition to these color reproductions, eighty-six black and white illustrations appear throughout the text of the illuminated books, continually reminding readers that Blake didn’t just produce volumes of poetry but illuminated works.

Footnotes and textual notes emphasize literary references, suggest readings intended to make more coherent the tangled network of Blake’s mythological works, and usually make reference to Blake scholarship from the [End Page 230] 1960s through to the current decade, though sometimes they reach further back. Reprints of responses to Blake by his contemporaries are almost identical to that of the first edition, except that Lamb has been dropped and replaced by Leigh Hunt’s review of Blake’s exhibition, providing some representation of hostile reactions to Blake during his lifetime. Selections of twentieth-century criticism are as annoyingly short in this volume as they are in any other Norton Critical Edition (I suspect the editors may feel the same way). Only three of the essays in the first edition make their way to the second, with no representation of the editors’ own forty-odd years of Blake scholarship. Another terrible exclusion is any essay by David Erdman, who does however find his way into footnotes more often than any other Blake scholar except for Morton Paley. The editors have been perhaps too careful about not citing their own work, their worst exclusions being reference to Johnson’s work on Blake and the emblem tradition in footnotes to For the Sexes, and Grant’s prickly, precise reading of “The Fly.” But they make up for it by their care to cite when possible up-and-coming Blake scholars such as Angus Whitehead, whose meticulous work on Blake in the 1790s deserves close attention and appraisal.

Having said this, the editors’ selection of twentieth-century criticism manages to represent a variety of approaches, including an excerpt from Ginsberg on Blake, pointing readers to Blake’s influence on American literature and culture. The select bibliography is extensive, inclusive of a number of points of view, and sensibly divided into categories that give newcomers to Blake scholarship some orientation within the diversity of scholarship on Blake, while the chronology sets the production of Blake’s illuminated books within the context of his overall artistic production, his major life events, and British history. By all standards this is the best edition of Blake available on the market today, especially if supplemented with online resources such as The William Blake Archive and The Blake Digital Text Project as intended. I would say that its only other shortcoming is one common to all text-based editions of Blake: art historical studies of Blake tend to be underrepresented in footnotes.

This edition, carefully assembled by two veteran Blake scholars, is ideal for graduate and undergraduate students, as well as casual readers; reasonably priced, it is sure to be a go-to edition for years to come. The editors themselves should have the last word, as they offer what might be the best advice possible to both long time and brand new readers of Blake: “Our advice is simply to start with whichever thread of meaning first catches your eye, follow that lead as far as it takes you; pick up the next loose end you see, and keep on exploring the book in your own way. . . . [K]eep following the glint of that golden string just ahead, winding as you go—and the walls will start opening before you.” [End Page 231]