Since its first publication in 1965, this collection has been widely hailed as the best available text of William Blake's poetry and prose. It is now expanded to include a new foreword by Harold Bloom, his definitive statement on Blake's greatness.

Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, William Blake (1757-1827) was a visionary English poet, painter, and printmaker. His wide-ranging influence can be seen in genres from theology and literature to popular music and graphic novels.

“[An] essential book in the study of an always fascinating author.”—Times Literary Supplement (tls)

"For our sense of Blake in his own times we are indebted to David Erdman more than anyone else."— Times Literary Supplement

"The crucial preliminary problem [in establishing Blake's text] is simply to make out what Blake wrote. . . . Erdman has used modern aids such as infrared photography and microphotography. . . but his real achievement has been to look at Blake's text more closely and intelligently than any previous editor." —New York Review of Books

"Very much fuller textual annotations [than any other Blake edition] and incorporates a remarkable number of new readings." —Southern Review

"[Blake] was a visionary, rather than a mystic, and like D. H. Lawrence and Sigmund Freud he hoped to encourage us to exalt our human potential. Perhaps William Blake can best be termed an apocalyptic humanist, who urges us never to forget that all deities reside within the human breast."—Harold Bloom, from the new foreword