William Blake

Both lyrical and spiritual, Blake’s poetry has a visionary intensity which on the surface appears rather un-English; yet his work has woven itself into the fabric of our landscape in much the same way as Elgar’s music. Equally familiar and inspirational, Blake’s poetry retains a prime position in the canon of English literature.

This selection is based on that made by Ruthven Todd for the original Crown Classics edition published in 1949. It seeks to represent the broad range of Blake’s work, whilst avoiding the minefields of his more abstruse and difficult poetry, “the maze of Blake’s mythology”, as Todd described it.