William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience: Illustrated by Robert Crayola - Softcover

The Songs of Innocence and Experience are masterpieces of English lyric poetry and William Blake's most famous work, presenting two vastly different views of the world: one beautiful and one horrific. This edition contains all of the poems (including the rare early poem, "A Divine Image") and unlike most editions, preserves Blake's idiosyncratic spelling, punctuation, and capitalization system. The poems are presented exactly as Blake intended them. To elucidate Blake's poems, 46 full-page illustrations were created by author and designer Robert Crayola. Each image is rendered in meticulous grayscale, and adds a new level of insight and clarity to the work. Also included are a commentary on the poems and an author biography, making this the definitive edition of this classic work.

William Blake (1757 – 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language." Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God," or "Human existence itself."