Hazard Adams: Blake’s Marginalia

Submitted by Arts & Sciences Web Team on

April 12, 2011 4:00pm

Communications 202

New Books in Print: Blake’s Marginalia

Known for his prophetic and imaginative works of poetry, painting, and printmaking, William Blake was also a prolific reader and annotator of other writers’ works, as well as a prolific commentator on both his own art and art in general.

These two studies are among the first to consider Blake’s writings and annotations in their entirety. Topics include art, poetry, theology, madness and philosophy; his opinions on his predecessors and his contemporaries (among them the authors Lavater, Swedenborg, Bacon, Spurzheim, Berkeley, and Wordsworth), his reaction to critics, and his artistic intentions. This valuable addition to Blake scholarship includes reproductions of some of the drawings and paintings in Blake’s one exhibition of 1809, plus reproductions of other prose texts by Blake.

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