William Blake's Poetry

Description

Reader's Guides provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical introduction to close reading and to analysing literary language and form. They provide up-to-date, authoritative but accessible guides to the most commonly studied classic texts. William Blake is a Romantic poet who remains popular today, in part because his exceptional insight into psychological, political and social issues remains powerfully relevant. The Reader's Guide begins by introducing Blake's major themes including religious, political and social issues and then moves on to reading key works, including Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It offers an invaluable introduction to reading Blake's poetry and includes sections on its contexts, language and style, critical reception and adaptation and influence and finally an annotated guide to further reading.

Jonathan Roberts is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool, UK.

"Robert's book is an almost ideal introductory guide for undergraduate students first coming to Blake: clearly and concisely written, short and accessible, inexpensive in its paperback issue, and effective in orienting newcomers to Blake's work to pertinent background knowledge as well as different critical approaches to Blake...Any undergraduate reader of this work will walk away from it well-oriented to Blake and Blake studies." -College Literature -- James Rovira "...to be commended for its readability, the lucidity and conclusion of its argument and, above all, for the light that it sheds upon one of the most enigmatic and challenging of our Western poets...Robert's packs his histories with luminaries of the age..." "Robert's study presents one of the most accessible, helpful and enjoyable introductions to Blake available hitherto, inviting and heartening initiates and scholars alike to come to grips with the full complexity of this difficult, but inspiring, poet... A most edifying read." The Glass, Spring 09