This book is the "Approved Edition" by the Center for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association of America, and is very complete and scholarly, even where it becomes a detriment. I believe an acquaintance summed it up best when she saw I was reading Blake, "He really makes me wonder if we are really the first culture to create LSD." While some of Blake's work is very lucid and vivid, inspiration and thought provoking, there are also long swaths of poetry that leave me completely baffled as to what was occurring. It was not so much an inability to follow deeper meaning (but that was there), but simply that some of his epic poems had such randomly changing and abstract symbolism in the stories that I could not keep track of what was going on.

My guideline for Blake became simple, his short poems and prose tended to be interesting and enjoyable, but the longer his prose and poetry stretched out, the more likely it was to shift into his very surreal style. A friend who considered herself a fan of Blake, didn't know what I was talking about, she quickly realized she was only familiar with the shorter poems, and became lost in the larger works, so I felt glad it wasn't just me. As abstract as it was, I occasionally caught glimmers of deeper currents of thoughts, but not always.

This edition didn't lie when it said it was the Complete Poetry and Prose, the last half of the book was Blake's commenting on the work of other authors, which was often quite amusing, as well as a collection of writings I found meaningless in this book. An example would be, the list of inscriptions he put beneath his paintings, which were next to meaningless without the art work he was referencing, or his letters to his friends.

Erdman went to great lengths to make this a very accurate portrayal of Blake's work, which was often edited after his death, and this edition included Blake's own commentary, corrections and deletion of various works, allowing you to see how his work changed.

A good collection, from a good fountain of art, but unless you're studying Blake from a scholarly perspective, you can probably skip the last half of the book. ( )

Many poets think, feel, and imagine; Blake saw and knew. ( )

Esp. like the proverbs of hell in marriage of heaven and hell.
See some writing on him: http://www.autodidactproject.org/guid... ( )

http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/wblake.htm...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_... ( )

Blake defies categories. His best poems (and brief sayings, I would add) have a permanent place in world literature. Five stars for those. ( )