William Blake on His Poetry and Painting

Blake was not only a poet, but also a prolific commentator on both his own art and art in general. This is the first text to discuss all of the writings except the annotations to Reynolds’ Discourses, covered in a previous volume, Blake’s Margins (McFarland, 2009). Topics include his opinions on his predecessors and his contemporaries, 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.

The late Hazard Adams was professor emeritus at the University of Washington’s department of comparative literature. He was known internationally as a scholar of William Blake, W.B. Yeats, Joyce Cary, and the history of criticism. He lived in Shelton, Washington.

Hazard Adams
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 199
Bibliographic Info: 21 photos, notes, index
Copyright Date: 2011
pISBN: 978-0-7864-4986-6
eISBN: 978-0-7864-8494-2
Imprint: McFarland

Preface      1
Introduction      3

PART I
1. A Descriptive Catalogue      7
2. A Vision of the Last Judgment      47
3. A Public Address      59
4. On Homers Poetry and On Virgil      67
5. Laocoön      74
6. On His Arts: In the Letters      82
7. Retrospective: The Early Tractates      94

PART II
8. On Poetry, His Poetry, and Other Poets      101
9. From the Prose to Jerusalem      123
10. From Jerusalem and the Prose to Yeats and Joyce      162

Postscript      185
Index      187