The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics)

This is a review of the Kindle edition.Many years ago, I got the Dover pocket editions of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. I was taken with the artwork but very grateful for the conventional printed text opposite each printed page. When I saw a Kindle edition of all Blake's illustrated works, I thought it would be wonderful to have them always with me. On the Kindle Fire, it is quite nice. The one drawback is that instead of the text facing the plates, it is printed in full after each work. For shorter works like All Religions are One or America: A Prophecy, this is workable. To have the full text of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience only after a display of all the plates is not so convenient.On the Kindle Paperwhite, the images are reasonably good and can be blown up reasonably well. It's okay for the works with larger text relative to page size like the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. For works where the printing is relatively smaller, like the Book of Urizen, the Kindle Paperwhite captures neither the artwork nor the printing in a very satisfying way.I'm going to assume that if you are looking at this, you are already aware of who Blake is and what he produced. This review is only of the presentation. If you have a Kindle Fire and love Blake, you will want to keep your printed copies but this is nice to have for a relatively good price. If you don't have a Kindle with a color screen, you're using a lot of memory for far less value.

Mastery and imagination... classic works of art with the poetry and epochs behind them. "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (basis of CS Lewis' "The Great Divorce") is an entire mythology, as well as satire (spiritual, political, and literary; Classics as well as his contemporaries).Terrific Illuminated stories and poems.This ebook: I wish had put each plate with that page of associated text, rather than different sections for each. But I loved being able to see the plates with the ease of reading the formatted text.

Blake's books are little but with my Kindle Fire I can enlarge the illustrations and that so neat!

The Penguin Complete Blake is by far the best edition for those who want to know how Blake works and what he was driving at in his so-called Prophetic Books, like MILTON and JERUSALEM. Other annotated editions, for example Harold Bloom's, are over-influenced by the editor's own opinions and sometimes refuse to explain the simplest things, like who the characters are or what Blake means by such terms as "spectre."Penguin covers it all, with as good a character listing as the famous BLAKE DICTIONARY's, and excellent notes keyed to the text so the reader knows what's happening as the prophetic poems go along. No other Blake collection gives so much, or so useful, help. In fact, there's nothing else like this Blake out there for helping the reader.Other reviewers have complained that Penguin lacks color plates. True enough, and some of the far more expensive color plate editions have good notes, but nothing like as good as Penguin's.Blake writes in a dreamlike style, and it is impossible to make total sense of him, but more than a century of scholarship has gone into clarifying his work, and he needs every annotation he gets here. An unparalleled great edition.

I bought the Kindle version and it is excellent! the artwork comes across very nicely.

I got this kindle version more for the illustrations than the text.It was cheap. $1 or $2 I think. I don't know that I'll get around to reading it.anyway, the text is too small for my eyes. It would be better to get a physical book for the illustrations.

Good and educative poems with some personal experience while reading.

Blake's prints are too small for a small screen. Unless you can project on a large screen the book is useless. magnifying a small section does not give the true effect. I saw these plates in a 11' by 8' book. There they were a work of art.

The English Language and English Literature have two visionary geniuses, William Shakespeare and William Blake. They are equal because different and they are both great because they see beyond words and beyond the surface of things, though with different means at times. And American English Literature has a third one, Walt Whitman. Three pillars of English visionary mythology that make any other mythology, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu or Buddhist very small indeed. They can only compare with Maya mythology that enters a completely different though just as intense universe of fantastic and at times horrific, cosmic power and life.William Blake is a poetic monument created by human surrealist nature. He refers to himself and his own roots exclusively though he has nourished his imagination with the visions of others and, first of all, of all Apocalypses ever written or simply imagined by anyone since the mutating birth of Homo Sapiens. Blake wants to assume that human history, but he tries to go beyond all categories our Indo-European languages impose onto our thinking. For him time is timeless and becomes pure duration, space is spaceless and becomes a pure and permanent reversal of the inside outside and of the outside inside. He vertically aligns three cardinal points North, South, and East, and makes West turn around this North-South-East axis delimiting a spindle that becomes a vision of our life, soul, mind, and flesh. We are that rotating spindle that collapses inwards permanently and swells outwards again incessantly and infinitely. And even if we really are that spindle in every one of ourselves, the whole universe is a spindle of all the human spindles on its own and all by itself. The whole universe is flesh, the whole universe is divine, the whole universe is satanic, the whole universe is the promise of salvation in that very Brownian chaos of our dreaming imagination that encompasses all these movements and tries to rebuild some epiphanic salvation in that seemingly incoherent apocalypse. And that salvation is visual, a vision in color, shapes, and forms, movements and drifts and the use of illuminations and graphic representations are just the shapings of this inner mentally graphic meaning.These various dimensions are intertwined in, for example, “Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion”: the dramatic line (single or multi-linear, if we follow the debate dominated by David Whitmarsh), the style and the music, the imagery and the menagerie, the religious inspiration and the iconoclastic anti-references, and of course the illustrations. Blake gives the lie to George Lakoff when this latter says, “Metaphor is a natural phenomenon since "conceptual metaphor is part of human thought, and linguistic metaphor is part of human language" (LAKOFF, G. & JOHNSON, M. Metaphors We Live By. The University of Chicago Press, 2003 [1980], p.247) For Blake it is all a mental graphic multidimensional semiotic hybridization, and thus has nothing to do with the natural of natural phenomena. In fact, we can wonder if Lakoff does not take “natural” with the meaning of “human-produced” because “human thought and… human language” have been devised by Homo Sapiens in his long emergence from his Hominin ancestors. Nothing natural there but only phylogenic development of the mind and language that developed pre-Sapiens Hominins into Sapiens Hominins.To capture this art you must concentrate on some sections, even short excerpts, probably one or two plates to be able to see in full detail how this poetry tries to recreate the Hebraic Semitic capture of the world and conceptualization of life, I mean the Semitic vision of the world with a language that only starts from consonantal roots and then conceptualizes a whole network of notions derived from these roots by the use of vocalic variations, the roots keeping there meaning no matter how far from them the discursive words are built with such vocalic variations and compositions of such roots and derived discursive words. But Blake works in a language that is two phylogenic articulations further down our phylogenic evolution, a synthetic-analytical language. Blake is a typical English poet who knows those ancient and ancestral languages enough to try to transport their conceptualizing power into English itself. His prophetic texts are the visual and graphic results of that attempt.But to really understand Blake you also need to take into account the simple, short poems like the famous Tyger poem:Tyger Tyger, burning bright,In the forests of the night;What immortal hand or eye,Could frame thy fearful symmetry?And these simple poems have been a phenomenal inspiration to many artists in England but also in the world. I will only take one example, Benjamin Britten and his opera The Little Sweep. It starts from two poems by William Blake, the Chimney Sweeper, one in the Songs of Innocence (1789) and the other in the Songs of Experience (1794). The two poems have contradictory meanings on the basis of the same description of a hateful and bleak occupation for boys under ten.The first poem’s conclusion is:“Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.”Good boy indeed who knows his duty. The second poem’s conclusion is"And because I am happy and dance and sing,They think they have done me no injury,And are gone to praise God and his priest and king,Who make up a heaven of our misery."This chimney sweeper shows some kind of childish happiness that hides well the real bleak misery inside.If we keep in mind this contradictory message from the most empathetic English poet ever, we can then get into the opera whose libretto was written by Eric Crozier. In that opera, Benjamin Britten plays on the strong image of Blake’s first poem of these boys being locked up in black coffins of soot and their being freed by an angel.“That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.And by came an angel who had a bright key,And he opened the coffins and set them all free;Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind.”Benjamin Britten, or Eric Crozier, uses the image of the coffins many times: stuck in the chimney, then hidden in the toy cupboard, spending the night there, and finally being moved out of the house and onto his liberation in a traveling chest. Every time the boy is liberated in a way or another, the last time is a promise though, by the children of the house who plot that whole procedure, hence playing the role of the angel and led into that by three girls along with three boys, a perfect David’s star, from two families, the Brooks (two girls and one boy) and the Cromes (two boys and one girl), one triangle point up representing the light of divine truth poured down into the human cup and one triangle point down representing the human cup receiving the divine light.So, enjoy Blake's poetry and try to enjoy it more than just read it. Contemplate, empathize and visualize in your mind’s eye that poignant reality, that cruel suffering in Blake’s vision and you might be engulfed in a power that has been running from 300,000 years ago when Homo Sapiens emerged from Homo Erectus or Homo Ergaster in Black Africa to today when the whole humanity and the planet itself are on the verge of going through the sixth mass extinction of life, and this time due to over-population, over-exploitation of natural resources and extreme over-pollution.Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

This is a lovely book. Blake's illustrations are beautifully reproduced and, on my Kindle Fire, a double tap expands them to full size. Each section of illustrations is followed by the text, so there's no need to puzzle over Blake's handwriting, unless one really wants to. So much excellent content for so tiny a price is truly amazing value.

Awful!Hard to read and badly laid outDont waste your time

There's a lot more to Blake than I'd realisedThis is a very good read and re-read and re-read and again I'm loving it

I am very happy with the quality of the book and the effectiveness of the delivery, Thank you.