William Blake (1757-1827)

Blake on the Web

You might find these sites useful for AS and A Level. For texts and additional reading, see below - and try out the interactive Blake context page too.

Grave of William and Catherine Blake in Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, London: see right for the messages.

• The William Blake Archive
  This superb hypermedia archive includes a huge resource of Blake's pictures, engravings and manuscripts.
  

• Blake Online at Tate Britain
  Tate Britain has a number of important Blake pictures. Of particular interest to teachers is the interactive section on The Songs of Innocence and Experience, with readings and notes on both the illustrations and the text, which was designed to accompany an exhibition in 2000. The site is easy to navigate and informative, with a section for teachers and students.

  The interactive section on The Songs of Innocence and Experience has readings and notes on both the illustrations and the text for a number of poems, including The Tyger.
  

  Still inspiring disciples: messages left at Blake's grave, June 2005.

• The Blake Digital Text Project
  This contains the complete works online. The graphical hypertext section on The Songs of Innocence and Experience is particularly useful. It contains many graphics (including images for each stanza), audio (including song settings), annotations (just click on the images for notes on each stanza) and bibliographies. You might want to jump straight to the index of titles.
  

• Web Concordance of Songs of Innocence and of Experience
  This valuable tool from Dundee University allows you to explore in detail how Blake uses words, putting them in context. The site also contains a workbook which demonstrates the value of this approach.

• BBC AS Guru - Blake's 'London'
  This is a useful but fairly brief introduction (aimed, as the name imples, at AS students) to the contexts of this poem. The pages will, however, leave you wanting more information to be able to relate the contexts to the whole collection.

• Guardian and Observer articles in response to Tate Britain's William Blake exhibition in 2000:
  • 'Twixt heaven and hell: Blake's life was one of squalor and frustration; most people thought him mad. No wonder he dreamed of a green and pleasant land, says Jonathan Glancey - The Guardian 9 November 2000.
  • Into the mystic: Visions of paradise to words of wisdom... an homage to the written work of William Blake - Neil Spencer: 'You might think that as one of England's finest and most-quoted poets Blake has never been away, but it isn't so. He was roundly ignored in his lifetime....' With comments by Iain Sinclair, Andrew Motion and others - The Observer 22 October 2000.
  • Blake's progress: 'Like today's YBA's, William Blake felt compelled to shock and provoke. But that's where the similarity ends..... He lived through the rise of industrialisation, commercialisation and rationalism. He was against all three. He was for ancient knowledge, spiritualism and mysticism.' Matthew Collings: The Observer, 22 October 2000.
  
  
• William Blake - items from the Preston Blake Collection on the MOTCO site, including interesting contemporary comments (1806) on William Blake by Benjamin Heath Malkin.

• Lost Innocence – Teaching Blake at A Level by Mark Brassington
  This useful introduction for teachers is available to download as a PDF in Part 2 of the last issue of The English and Media Magazine.

Books on Blake

• Songs of Innocence and of Experience edited by Richard Willmott: this edition contains useful notes and study material.
• Peter Ackroyd: Blake - Vintage: this excellent biography provides a great deal of valuable contextual material.
• Judy Cox: William Blake: The Scourge of Tyrants - Redwords: this readable little book (under 100 pages) places Blake firmly in his political context.
• Morris Eaves (Editor): The Cambridge Companion to William Blake (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
• Heather Glen: Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge Paperback Library) - recommended by Dr Alistair Cormack of the University of East Anglia as "the best book I've ever read on Blake and also the best book I've ever read on Wordsworth". Unfortunately it seems currently to be out of print so either try a library or a second-hand seller such as Abebooks or through the Amazon link here.
• Saree Makdisi: William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s - University of Chicago Press. "According to Makdisi, Blake's poetry and drawings should compel us to seriously reconsider ths history of the 1790s - the turbulent and revolutionary decade in which they first emerged."
• Nicholas Marsh: William Blake: The Poems (Analysing Texts Series)

Blake in song

• The Blake Digital Text Project is a good place to start - you can hear samples of settings by several composers for each of The Songs of Innocence and Experience.
• The American composer William Bolcom created a huge work based upon the Songs, first performed in 1984 and recently issued as a Naxos recording on three CDs - you can read the review which appeared in the Guardian here.
• Vaughan Williams set Ten Blake Songs, available sung by Ian Partridge, John Mark Ainsley, James Bowman and others.
• Singer Patti Smith will feature Blake's songs in the Meltdown festival on London's South Bank during June 2005 - read more in the Guardian page here.