The Book of Thel (Illuminated Manuscript with the Original Illustrations of William Blake)


Book Description

This carefully crafted ebook: “The Book of Thel (Illuminated Manuscript with the Original Illustrations of William Blake)” is formatted for your eReader with a functional table of contents. The Book of Thel is a poem by William Blake, dated 1789 and probably composed in the period 1788 to 1790. It is illustrated by his own plates, and is relatively short and easy to understand, compared to his later prophetic books. The metre is a fourteen-syllable line. It was preceded by Tiriel, which Blake left in manuscript. A few lines from Tiriel were incorporated into The Book of Thel. Most of the poem is in unrhymed verse. This book consists of eight plates executed in illuminated printing. Sixteen copies of the original print of 1789-1793 are known. Three copies bearing a watermark of 1815 are more elaborately colored than the others. William Blake (1757 – 1827) was a British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. Blake proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th-century. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.




William Blake


Book Description

In his illuminated books,William Blake combined his handwritten text with his exuberant imagery on pages the like of which had not been seen since the great decorated books of the Middle Ages. To read such books as Jerusalem, America and Songs of Innocence and of Experience in cold letterpress bears no comparison to seeing and reading them as Blake conceived them, infused with his sublime and exhilarating colours. At times tiny figures and forms dance among the lines of the text, flames appear to burn up the page, and dense passages of Biblical-sounding text are brought to a jarring halt by startling images of death, destruction and liberation. This edition, produced together with The William Blake Trust, contains all the pages of Blakes twenty or so illuminated books reproduced in true size, an appendix with all Blakes text set in type and an introduction by the noted Blake scholar, David Bindman. They can at last become part of the lives of all lovers of art and poetry.




The Continental Prophecies


Book Description

The last volumes in the series of William Blake's Illuminated Books reveal the writer and artist as a prophet driven by a sense of apocalyptic urgency. Blake conceived and executed The Continental Prophecies and The Urizen Books in the early 1790s, capturing the intellectual and spiritual turmoil of the American and French revolutions. Here, for the first time, the general reader will encounter Blake's most intense vision in reproductions that do justice to the originals, accompanied by texts, comprehensive notes and commentaries, and detailed interpretations of the designs. The Continental Prophecies, which comprises "America," "Europe," and "The Song of Los," presents Blake's critical reckoning with the history of his own times. Marked by a particularly close integration of word and image, the books form a mythical plot from historical events and criticize the intricate structure of social oppression that the author attributes to organized state religion. Each of the three books attempts to point a way toward the process of millennial liberation. These volumes complete the six-part series of William Blake's Illuminated Books, including Jerusalem, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (now available in paperback), The Early Illuminated Books, and Milton, A Poem, all published by Princeton University Press.




William Blake: Seen in My Visions: A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures


Book Description

In 1809 the little-known artist William Blake held an exhibition of 16 paintings in a private house in Soho in the west end of London. Works inspired by Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" and John Milton's "Paradise Lost" sat alongside biblical scenes and Arthurian legend. The exhibition was not a success; the only review in the press was extremely unfavourable and few of the public came. One of those who did was the poet Charles Lamb, who later described the pictures as 'hard, dry, yet with grace', and the catalogue that accompanied the show as 'mystical and full of vision'. It is this catalogue that Tate Publishing are once again making available. In it, the scale and range of Blake's ambition are made plain, along with his theories on painting, his unsparing critiques of other artists and some extraordinary insights into the working of his mind. The only detailed writing on art that remains to us by Blake, it throws light on all his subsequent artistic enterprises, including the illuminated books for which he is perhaps most famous. Part commentary and part manifesto, his catalogue is as radical as it is in places eccentric (he claims at one point to have been transported in a "vision" back to the classical world). Fully illustrated in colour with reproductions of surviving works originally in the exhibition, the book includes an illuminating essay by leading authority on British art Martin Myrone, Lead Curator of Pre-1800 Art at Tate Britain, making it an essential purchase for all of those wanting to know more.




Songs of Innocence


Book Description




The Book of Job


Book Description

With a new introduction by Michael Marqusee.




Worm Work


Book Description

Worms. Natural history is riddled with them. Literature is crawling with them. From antiquity to today, the ubiquitous and multiform worm provokes an immediate discomfort and unconscious distancing: it remains us against them in anthropocentric anxiety. So there is always something muddled, or dirty, or even offensive when talking about worms. Rehabilitating the lowly worm into a powerful aesthetic trope, Janelle A. Schwartz proposes a new framework for understanding such a strangely animate nature. Worms, she declares, are the very matter with which the Romantics rethought the relationship between a material world in constant flux and the human mind working to understand it. Worm Work studies the lesser-known natural historical records of Abraham Trembley and his contemporaries and the familiar works of Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin, William Blake, Mary Shelley, and John Keats, to expose the worm as an organism that is not only reviled as a taxonomic terror but revered as a sign of great order in nature as well as narrative. This book traces a pattern of cultural production, a vermiculture that is as transformative of matter as it is of mind. It distinguishes decay or division as positive processes in Romantic era writings, compounded by generation or renewal and used to represent the biocentric, complex structuring of organicism. Offering the worm as an archetypal figure through which to recast the evolution of a literary order alongside questions of taxonomy from 1740 to 1820 and on, Schwartz unearths Romanticism as a rich humus of natural historical investigation and literary creation.




THE BOOK OF THEL (Original Illuminated Manuscript)


Book Description

"The Book of Thel" is a poem by William Blake, dated 1789 and probably composed in the period 1788 to 1790. It is illustrated by his own plates, and is relatively short and easy to understand, compared to his later prophetic books. The metre is a fourteen-syllable line. It was preceded by Tiriel, which Blake left in manuscript. A few lines from Tiriel were incorporated into The Book of Thel. Most of the poem is in unrhymed verse. This book consists of eight plates executed in illuminated printing. Sixteen copies of the original print of 1789-1793 are known. Three copies bearing a watermark of 1815 are more elaborately colored than the others. William Blake (1757 – 1827) was a British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. Blake proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th-century. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.




The Grave. a Poem


Book Description

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.




English Romantic Poetry


Book Description

Rich selection of 123 poems by six great English Romantic poets: William Blake (24 poems), William Wordsworth (27 poems), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (10 poems), Lord Byron (16 poems), Percy Bysshe Shelley (24 poems) and John Keats (22 poems). Introduction and brief commentaries on the poets. Includes 2 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: "Ozymandias" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn."