Rating: 
Summary: songs of innonence
Review: a great book thus symbolic meaning of a child innonece reflects the attitude of a lamb who is humble meek and obebient.
Rating:
Summary: A Revelation
Review: I bought this book for a friend's birthday. At home, I read it through, soon experiencing the shameful thought that I wanted to keep it for myself. I didn't keep it, but I quickly found my own copy.Fool that I am, I have never appreciated poetry much. This book opened my eyes. I write this review in the hope that someone may be encouraged to read it, and experience the wonder that it brought to me. No words can do justice to these poems. I just marvel at how such seemingly simple compositions could contain so much meaning. Blake cuts straight to the spiritual essence of human existence. There are very few books that I could say have deepened my faith in God. This is one.
Rating:
Summary: A Revelation
Review: I bought this book for a friend's birthday. At home, I read it through, soon experiencing the shameful thought that I wanted to keep it for myself. I didn't keep it, but I quickly found my own copy. Fool that I am, I have never appreciated poetry much. This book opened my eyes. I write this review in the hope that someone may be encouraged to read it, and experience the wonder that it brought to me. No words can do justice to these poems. I just marvel at how such seemingly simple compositions could contain so much meaning. Blake cuts straight to the spiritual essence of human existence. There are very few books that I could say have deepened my faith in God. This is one.
Rating:
Summary: A must have!
Review: I recommend that any fan of William Blake buy this volume and the other 5 in the series. The books are beautiful, large, and handsomely bound. Each book is reproduced in full color, using a six-color printing process rather than the standard four. The pages are heavy, opaque and have a gorgous lustre indicating very high quality paper. The text of each book accompanies the color reproductions in standard typeface with very competent commentary to boot.
Rating:
Summary: Great Edition of Blake
Review: I was recently lucky to see the Gutenburg to Gone With the Wind Exhibit in Austin, Texas recently. At that marvelous exhibit I got to see one of Blake's original editions of Songs of Innocence. After that, I (of course) had to find a copy with the amazing poems and the amazing artwork by Blake. This edition satisfied both criteria well. First of all, the poems are brilliant. Everybody has read such works as "Little Boy Lost," "Little Boy Found," "The Shepherd," "The Lamb," and "The Tyger." These poems are just as good as they are made out to be. Each poem is excrutiatingly simple (in the style of children's verse), and each has such depth. The artwork is all in this edition, too, and it is fabulous. The colors are exactly like those of Blake's. I really think that the poems should never be read without Blake's engravings. This is a marvelous book for poetry lovers to own. It is high quality and affordable. Any fan of Blake's should own this book.
Rating:
Summary: A Fiery Forge
Review: It may seem an immediate departure to discuss Blake's biography, but it must be considered. Leaving formal school at ten, Blake first entered a drawing school, very early evincing great artistic talent. An eight year apprenticeship with engraver James Basire was a milestone of Blake's rather low key life. Blake's talents in the art of engraving were immeasurably important to both the full expression of his poetry and visual art. As a poet, Blake opted for an almost facile, rhythmic, lyrical approach. His metre was superbly tight, his vocabulary surprisingly controlled for an 18th century writer. Of the two parts, Songs of Experience is the better of the two; not only did five years give Blake's poetry just one more dash of prowess, but his topics are dealt with in a more effective and interesting manner. His subject matter also becomes more bleak, more wearily phrased. A perfect example: Here is a stanza from ...Innocence's The Divine Image For mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human dress
And love, the human form divine
And peace the human dress Compare this with the poem of the same name in experience: Cruelty has a human heart,
And jealousy a human face
Terror, the human form divine
And secrecy, the human dress Whyfore this turnabout, from an almost sanguine mentality to one so dour and unmitigatedly bleak that Blake excluded this poem and attendant engraving in most editions of his Songs... First, the death of Robert, Blake's beloved younger brother and apprentice. It is said that Blake stayed up a fortnight nursing his ill brother; a four day sopor followed. Later, Blake was to report that he was visited by Robert's spirit, laden with ideas as to the format of the Songs. ...Such poems as the Chimney Sweeper and the Little Boy Lost are frightful, cynical visions of the fractured side of London life. Take this stanza from Little Boy Lost, a story of a child martyed for speaking his mind: The weeping child could not be heard
The weeping parents wept in vain
They strip'd him to his little shirt
And bound him with an iron chain And burned him in a holy place
Where many had been burned before
The weeping parents wept in vain
Are such things done on Albions shore? This darker judgement of life does not preclude the two motifs most sacred to Blake: Religion and love. Poems such as the Clod and the Pebble, The Pretty Rose Tree, both Holy Thursdays, the Laughing Song, and the Lamb all explore some aspect of divine justice or the perverse or beautiful aspects of love. Something fascinating: In that very racist, colony-crazy, native torching time, Blake iconoclastically treats the subject of race in the Little Black Boy, which describes a black child of such spiritual perception that he is able to guide his paler brethren on the path to God. This intimation of an oppressed race's closeness to an arcane but majestic God is a keynote in the study of the fiercely individualistic Blake. Buy this book when you see it.
Rating: 
Summary: The Other Blake
Review: Sorry, all, I'm not much of a poetry fan. I like "Tyger," "Garden of Love," and a few others, but I can't add to the scholarship on his verse.
I am, however, fascinated by his use of relief etching in creating these pages. It's a rare process even now, and was revealed to Blake in a vision (plus a lot of painstaking experimentation). It's the process by which he shaped each letter, reversed, in the printing plate, plus much of the 'illumination' on each page.
The preface is vague and the reproduced images are hard to read, but Blake printed the lettering and line work on each page, then hand-decorated with watercolors. The preface says that Blake went on to create color printing processes, but what they were or whether they're used here is not explicit. I tend to think not, unless a few pages were printed with one or two more plates to emphasize the dark areas. If these illustrations really are true size, then inking on the plate would have been tedious, imprecise, and would not have given the results seen here.
There's much to say about his illustration. That includes an odd conflict, between figures fully drawn even under clothing and the androgyny or sexlessness of so many, an ambiguity that appears in the poems as well. I'll leave that commentary to others, though. The thing that impresses me about these editions is their artistic intensity. Each individual copy of the book was printed and decorated on demand, for a specific buyer. Blake had full control of every part of the creation, the words, images, and reproduction.
It is a rare mind that can master visual and verbal arts, both, then the craft of creating the book that carries them. Perhaps I miss parts of the presentation, but I very much admire the parts that I understand. Four stars because better reproduction would have served his visual art and craft much better.
//wiredweird
Rating:
Summary: The Oxford Paperbacks edition is superb
Review: There are larger, more luxurious graphical editions of Blake's two most popular works but the Oxford SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE is perhaps the most affordable and convenient. After a short introductory piece which makes the reader expect a pastoral mood, SONGS OF INNOCENCE opens with "The Shepherd", and the reader is immediately acquainted with Blake's style: deceptively simple, but filled with metaphor and allusion. Many of the poems speak of the solace of Christianity, but Blake shows a more universal and tolerant tranquility found through appreciation of simple human virtues. In "The Divine Image", he writes: "And all must love the human form, / in heathen, turk, or jew. / Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell, / there God is dwelling too." Even within SONGS OF EXPERIENCE, the most pessimistic and cynical half, Blake maintains a his childlike style in order to bring the truth of human experience to anyone at all, young and old. In "A Poison Tree" he writes: "I was angry with my friend: / I told my wrath, my wrath did end. / I was angry with my foe: / I told it not, my wrath did grow", concisely summarising the effects of pride and ill-will on one's soul. Blake was by profession an engraver, and his engravings for SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE are so closely bound to the text of the poems that a photocopy edition is really the only way to enjoy the poems as they were meant. In this paperback edition, the original engraving can be seen along side a typeset text, presented in a size large enough that the words can be relatively easily made out and, perhaps more importantly, the reader can see Blake's mythological characters. These personages, such as Urizen and Lothos, are key to understanding Blake's larger metaphysical work, for which the Songs present a good introduction. This edition is especially valuable as it contains a photocopy of the engraving of "A Divine Image", a poem intended for SONGS OF EXPERIENCE which Blake subsequently left out because of its savage pessimism. The poem survives on an uncolored plate which is not found within many collections of the poet's work. If you are intrigued by poets who transcend mere beautiful words to present a complete worldview, Blake is certainly worth reading. The Oxford Paperbacks edition is, in my opinion, the best place to get started with this deep and tricky, but fulfilling and fascinating poet.
Rating:
Summary: Blake's most popular illuminated works in a fine edition
Review: These are Blake's most popular and accessible works, by far. The poems combined with the wonderful drawings make powerful and memorable statements that stay in your heart and mind. Several, such as "The Tyger", "The Chimney Sweeper", and "London", are very well known. Each of us has our own personal favorites and love turning to them again and again. One of issues in buying an edition of these works is that they exist in a variety of colorings, and orders. I would recommend this edition for several reasons. The selection of the King's College Copy is one of the most uniformly delightful or the copies Blake (or his wife) colored. Also, the reproduction is of very high quality. Each plate is on a right hand page with the text in print on the left hand page (in case you have problem reading the plate). Even thought the book is in a large format, the plates are reproduced in their actual size (which is surprisingly modest). There are also a dozen plates provided from other editions. However, I would recommend that you pick up other editions based on other copies. The variety of schemes Blake used in coloring the plates is quite interesting and, well, illuminating. The second half of the book is commentary on the 54 plates of this copy. There is an introductory essay and a list of works cited in the commentary. It really is a beautiful reproduction and a joy to have on my shelf.
Rating:
Summary: Blake's most popular illuminated works in a fine edition
Review: These are Blake's most popular and accessible works, by far. The poems combined with the wonderful drawings make powerful and memorable statements that stay in your heart and mind. Several, such as "The Tyger", "The Chimney Sweeper", and "London", are very well known. Each of us has our own personal favorites and love turning to them again and again. One of issues in buying an edition of these works is that they exist in a variety of colorings, and orders. I would recommend this edition for several reasons. The selection of the King's College Copy is one of the most uniformly delightful or the copies Blake (or his wife) colored. Also, the reproduction is of very high quality. Each plate is on a right hand page with the text in print on the left hand page (in case you have problem reading the plate). Even thought the book is in a large format, the plates are reproduced in their actual size (which is surprisingly modest). There are also a dozen plates provided from other editions. However, I would recommend that you pick up other editions based on other copies. The variety of schemes Blake used in coloring the plates is quite interesting and, well, illuminating. The second half of the book is commentary on the 54 plates of this copy. There is an introductory essay and a list of works cited in the commentary. It really is a beautiful reproduction and a joy to have on my shelf.
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