William Blake was a poet, painter and master engraver, who was largely unrecognised in his lifetime, although he is now considered as being one of the greatest minds of the Romantic Age. His poetry is charged with a prophetic power and his visual artistry has led many critics to regard him as one of Britain’s greatest artists. Having lived in London almost all of his life, Blake produced a diverse and symbolically rich oeuvre of poetry and paintings, depicting his own inimitable view of religion and the world he lived in.
Poetical Sketches by W. B. was Blake’s first poetry collection to be printed and it contained poems written between 1769 and 1777. Only forty copies were printed in 1783, with the help of Blake’s friends, the artist John Flaxman and the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew. The book was never published for the public and the copies were given as gifts to the poet’s friends and family members. It contains nineteen lyric poems and a dramatic fragment, revealing the influence of such writers as Shakespeare, John Milton, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser and Horace Walpole, whose The Castle of Otranto had been released in 1764.
In the text, there are several misreadings and errors in punctuation, suggesting that it was printed with little care and was not proofread by the poet. Poetical Sketches was never mentioned in the Monthly Review, which listed every book published in London at the time, signifying that it had been virtually unnoticed.
The collection was seventy-two pages in length, printed in octavo by John Flaxman’s aunt, who owned a small print shop on the Strand. Each individual copy was hand-stitched, with a grey back and a blue cover. Poetical Sketches is one of only two works by Blake to be printed conventionally with typesetting. However, the collection never got beyond the proof copy and was never officially published. Of the original forty copies, only twenty-three survive, with the most recent being sold at a London auction in March 2012 for £72,000.