The Portable William Blake

The selections for this volume have been taken almost entirely from the “Nonesuch Press” edition of Blake’s complete writings in poetry and prose, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, (Nonesuch Press, London; Random House, New York). I cannot easily express my indebtedness to Dr. Keynes, who did the real work for this volume, and to his American publishers, Random House, Inc., who have facilitated its publication. The selections from Crabb Robinson’s Reminiscences have been taken from Arthur Symons’s supplement to his William Blake, London, 1907, where the notes on Blake were printed as a separate unit for the first time.

I should like to express my indebtedness to John Sampson’s edition of Blake’s “Poetical Works” (Oxford University Press), for guidance in making my own selections from The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem, I am equally indebted to D. J. Sloss and J. P. R. Wallis, editors of the Clarendon Press (Oxford, 1926) edition of Blake’s Prophetic Writings in two volumes. Without their editorial analysis, list of variants and unique glossary of Blake’s symbols, my own work would have been far more difficult.

I owe a great debt to many pioneer scholars in the field of Blake scholarship. In particular I should like to acknowledge, with gratitude and pleasure, the work of Swinburne; Joseph Wicksteed; S. Foster Damon; Max Plowman; Alexander Gilchrist; Mona Wilson; Arthur Symons; William Butler Yeats; John Sampson; Ruthven Todd; Geoffrey Grigson; J. Bronowski.

I should like to thank Pascal Covici for suggesting this work, and for his friendly encouragement. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Ruth Bunzel for many valuable suggestions. I owe much to John Marshall and David Stevens of the Rockefeller Foundation, and to Louis Wright and the staff of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, for making possible a study of Blake manuscripts. And emphatically not least, I should like to thank here my students and friends at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, with whom I read Blake in the Fall quarter, 1944.