• A new selection of the poetry of William Blake - largely ignored in his lifetime, but now recognised as a unique and haunting lyricist, and one of the key voices of the Romantic Age.
• Arranges Blake's poems by genre, looking at his Lyrics, Short Epics, Sublime Epics, and Satirical and Discursive works in turn.
• Nicholas Shrimpton's Introduction and explanatory notes consider modern Blake scholarship, his position as one of the defining English poets, his juvenilia, and the distinct genres of his work.
• Includes an up-to-date Bibliography, a Chronology, and a substantial Note on the Text.

   
'To see a World in a Grain of Sand
'And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour'
  
William Blake wrote some of the most moving and memorable verse in the English language. Deeply committed to visionary and imaginative experience, yet also fiercely engaged with the turbulent politics of his era, he is now recognised as a major contributor to the Romantic Movement. 
  
This edition presents Blake's poems in their literary categories and genres to which they belong: his much-loved lyrics, ballads, comic and satirical verse, descriptive and discursive poems, verse epistles, and, finally, his remarkable 'prophetic' poems, including the whole of his two diffuse epics, Milton and Jerusalem. 
  
Blake's poetry is intellectually challenging as well as formally inventive, and this edition has a substantial critical introduction which places his ideas in the contemporary context of the Enlightenment and the artistic reaction against its key assumptions.