William blake: selected poems

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour William Blake wrote some of the most moving and memorable verse in the English language.

Deeply committed to visionary and imaginative experience, yet also fiercely engaged with the turbulent politics of his era, he is now recognised as a major contributor to the Romantic Movement.

This edition presents Blakes poems in their literary categories and genres to which they belong: his much-loved lyrics, ballads, comic and satirical verse, descriptive and discursive poems, verse epistles, and, finally, his remarkable prophetic poems, including the whole of his two diffuse epics, Milton and Jerusalem .

Blakes poetry is intellectually challenging as well as formally inventive, and this edition has a substantial critical introduction which places his ideas in the contemporary context of the Enlightenment and the artistic reaction against its key assumptions.