William Blake - The Complete Poems

Many of his poems, including some major ones, exist only in much-revised manuscript form. No conventionally type-set edition of Blakes poetry can compete, either in beauty or in clarity, with the original illuminated books produced by the poet; neither can it suggest the full complexity of the texts in manuscript. Given these limitations, however, the intention of this edition is to reproduce the work with as much fidelity as possible to the forms in which he wrote it. Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius, Blake remarked. Intrigued readers may be lured onward to the originals, or to the many excellent facsimile editions of them which fortunately exist today. Spelling, grammar, punctuation.

Most readers will not be troubled by Blakes often archaic or eccentric spelling, his frequent use of capitalization for emphasis, his predilection for the rapid & as opposed to the conventional and, and his sometimes crude grammar. These peculiarities have usually been accepted by Blakes editors and readers alike as quirky but charming. A greater stumbling-block is Blakes punctuation, which is at all times idiosyncratic, and at some times, particularly in the manuscript poems, virtually non-existent. Most standard editions of Blake have supplied a conventional punctuation, but to alter in this matter is clearly to distort. I have therefore followed the procedure of David V. Erdman in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, retaining the poets punctuation and non-punctuation intact.

As a rule, any punctuation mark may be taken simply as a sign for a greater or lesser pause in the flow of language, rather than as an indicator of grammatical relationships. With a little relaxation and practice, the reader will find that this is less difficult than it appears at first, and finally that it may create a sense of freedom and buoyancy, and an openness of syntactic construction, which bring considerable aesthetic and intellectual pleasure. Revisions. In the presentation of textual variations, emendations, revisions, etc., a distinction is made between Blakes manuscript poems and his finished work. For poems which Blake published (or had published or printed for him) in any form, and which we may thus suppose to be finished, the relatively few variations which exist are presented in the Notes. For poems which exist only in manuscript form, this material is incorporated in the text through italics and brackets, reproducing as far as possible the condition of the texts in their workshop state, with successive stages of revision evident as one reads along.

The assumption here is that unfinished poems should not be presented to the eye as if they were finished, and vice versa; and that the reader will benefit from an opportunity to sense Blakes verse both as working process and as completed product. In this respect, the innovative and successful procedure of Geoffrey Keyness Nonesuch and Oxford editions of the Complete Writings is followed with gratitude. Texts. The texts on which the present edition is based are those of David V. Erdman, The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Doubleday, 1970. This volume should be consulted for complete detail in regard to Blakes revisions, and for full discussion of textual complexities.

There are some changes, particularly in punctuation. The marks !, ?, : and ; are often difficult to distinguish in Blakes calligraphy. Erdman commonly transcribes ! where I find a colon or semi-colon. Blakes full stops and commas are also difficult to tell apart, and he is rather skimpy about the latter. Thus in works where both . and , appear, they are retained (but the readings sometimes disagree with Erdmans).