The luring songs of Luvah

William Blake on the web (Go here for this page without the evocative but distracting background.

William Blake, 1757-1827, was an English poet, artist, engraver, and publisher. His writings and art are extraordinary. They have been a source of inspiration to me over 30 years. Here are some William Blake pages on the web.

Exhibit at the Tate! Britain's Tate Gallery presents a comprehensive exhibition of Blake as an artist, as a poet, and as a man. (This was at the Tate 9 November 2000 - 11 February 2001, then to the Metropolitan March 29 - June 24, 2001. The Online Exhibits are still up!) Giles Murray has produced an 88 page educational Online Interactive Exhibit to accompany the exhibition, featuring recordings of the Songs, an interactive guide to Blake's London, a dictionary of Blake's characters, and an Amazing Facts about Blake game for a teenage audience, and their arrangement and display here seems ideally suited to present these themes vividly and intelligently.

Blake Digital Text Project, Nelson Hilton's home of eE: The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, edited by David V. Erdman. Believe it or not! (The text is a 2.1 Mb ASCII file available for browsing or downloading.) This site now has a working concordance that brings up the line with the search term(s), as hyperlinks to their wider context _and_ to the complete work containing the search term(s). They've recently added Songs of Innocence and Experience in graphical hypertext. An astounding and useful site!

The Blake Archive, a hypermedia archive sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Sun Microsystems, and Inso Corporation, and the international array of 18 libraries and museums that have generously given permission to represent works from their collections in the Archive.

The Archive has grown considerably, from including several of the extant copies of the illuminated books known as The Book of Thel[1] (1789), and Visions of the Daughters of Albion[2] (1793) to now presenting fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 49 copies of all 19 of these wonderful multimedia works of genius, including at long last Jerusalem, plus a fully SGML-encoded electronic edition of David V. Erdman's _Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake_. The Archive now contains at least one copy of each of Blake's works in illuminated printing. The illuminations require patience with a modem connection, but they're well worth it. And the Archive has recently added a biography, glossary, and chronology!

The Blake Multimedia Project, currently has hypertext editions (for downloading in Hypercard stacks, files for the Mac) of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Songs of Innocence and Experience, and The Book of Job, and includes online only sample pages from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Hypertext Edition, but these give an intriguing look at what Blake might have done with C++ coding and HTML.

The "bounding line": Verbal and Visual Linearity in Blake's "Laocoön" and Book of Urizen. This is a wonderful essay on two of my favorite Blake works with fabulous and apt illustrative graphics.

A thesis by David Whitmarsh-Knight on the magnificant Vala, or The Four Zoas. The clear discussion of the text Blake seemed to complete, with a definitive interlocking of the two Nights the Seventh, makes this work a valuable one indeed!

Alfred Kazin's fine essay, An Introduction to William Blake

A physician's paper on Blake's "Milton" called Meaning and Madness, by Edward Friedlander, M.D.

William Blake and Allen Ginsberg: Poets in a Fallen World, Prophets of the New World (a thesis on the prophetic tradition in the poetry of Blake and Ginsberg). Essay by Christopher Thomas Pellnnat, dealing with Blake's America.

The Anti-Teleological Dialogism of the Imagination, in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by Steven M. Streufert. Don't let the title scare you off!

Adam Marcotte's useful William Blake page has Geoffrey Keynes' brief but superb introduction and links to ten more good Blake sites. Several musical settings to Blake's Songs are introduced and reviewed here too.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with plates. Complete but not arranged well, it's part of an interesting site on alchemy.

William Blake's Urizen Books, with the text and links to the plates for the The Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania, and The Book of Los. Still under construction but very ambitious.

The Print and the Book, Night Thoughts, by Edward Young (1742) and illustrated by Wm. Blake (1797).

Blake Links at Union College. A very thorough list of URLs categorized into archives, galleries, scholarly work, and other, though with no editorial descriptions. There are also some brief essays on Blake's life, works, and technique with informative graphics.

Selected Poetry of William Blake, includes 40 poems. This site is part of "Representative Poetry Online" at the University of Toronto, which has HTML indexes by poet, first line, date, keyword, and criticism on poetry. A fabulous site for poetry lovers!

Dan Archibald's William Blake Resources: The Blake Archive for Humans. A fine and fan-ciful collection of original and resource material.

Selected Poems of William Blake, part of Richard Darsie's Dead Poets Society, includes The Clod and the Pebble, The Tyger, Piping Down the Valleys Wild, and Hear the Voice of the Bard, among a dozen others.

Various poems by Anonymous FTP for the old fashioned 'net surfer.

The Doors of Perception, with the text of most of the early work, 1788-1794. By Mitsuru Watanabe.

Blake Quotations, by Jorn Barger, including some of the wonderful and rarely reprinted "annotations". (This page page is also available at the extraordinary Internet Archive.) See also Jorn's William Blake Resources page, a chronological listing of works with links to them on the 'net.

Timo Klimoff's Blake Page, with a superb collection of links.

William Blake Info Page, in German.

Making good use of Toronto'a Representative Poetry Online and other online resources, is Charles Beauvais' timeline of Blake's life, art, and work. With the complete Poetical Sketches (1768) and lyrics from the Notebook (1791), as well as many more of Blake's designs and writings, it is an ambitious and quite wonderful (tho' as yet uncompleted) project.

Also making use of Toronto'a Representative Poetry Online and other online resources is the William Blake page at Mythos and Logos. With poems, paintings, and books.

William Blake at Yahoo!, and their Directory listing. About 15 links.

William Blake at the Google Web directory.

WilliamBlake at the Poetry Archives, with most of the poems.

Blake's Laocoon, and the wonderful text, and see it in a 137K image with text.

The First Book of Urizen and Elenor (from Poetical Sketches), presented by extraTEXTure, the system that takes you from one verse to another, link to link. A very nice way to read something in a leisurely and thoughtful manner.

Richard Dover of the North East Wales Institute has a helpfile page with some poems, paintings and engravings. Includes fine notes to the poetry and a "Life and Times" essay.

A wonderful page by Carol Gerten-Jackson has a brief biography (from Encarta) and color images of eleven of Blake's illustrations. Her site is an extraordinary compendium of wonderful pictures by many excellent artists, including three by Blake's early friend, the "wild" Fuseli.

Chrisis Church of Art, eclectic collection of colorful conundrums by Douglas Lovelace, has five pages of quotations and an excellent selection of paintings.

The William Blake Page at Abacci Books.

William Blake at About.com.

WilliamBlake.com - someone finally bought the domain!

No catalog would be complete without a link to the color plates of some of Blake's work at the WebMuseum, Paris. The WebMuseum is a wonderful repository of paintings and their context, indexed by artist and by theme.


This background is from The Blake Page by Richard Record. Gail Gastfield is the reproduction artist (used with permission).


This page is the primary Blake reference at the quite extraordinary Literary Calendar, a veritable almanac of literary information. And check out The Reading Room for a cornucopia of literature on the 'net.


Go to home thoughts, or try a little bit about me.












[1] The Book of Thel (1789) is Blake's first illuminated book written in lines of fourteen syllables, a measure used in most of his subsequent books. Thel, a virgin shepherdess burdened by her sense of mortality, seeks meaning for her life by talking with several creatures--a lily, cloud, worm, and clod of clay. These speaking symbols of life's transience are satisfied with their lot because all believe themselves to be part of natural cycles related through self-sacrifice to a higher purpose. On the final plate, Thel comes to her grave and hears her own unanswered questions redolent with fears of both death and sexuality. This voice, and Thel's flight from it, indicate either her failure to accept the harsh facts of life or the failure of her interlocutors' philosophy to satisfy the human desire for transcendental truths. (Taken from The Blake Archive.)

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[2]Oothoon, the central figure in the poem, plucks "Leutha's flower" of female sexuality but is soon raped by Bromion. Her lover, Theotormon, responds with silence or useless abstractions. This slender plot is but a thread on which Blake hangs Oothoon's questionings of conventional morality. She insists on her inner purity and, in a long concluding lament to the "Daughters of Albion," on the varieties of energetic self-expression that cannot be delimited by materialist philosophies or legalistic codes. The characters and their words represent Blake's critique of colonialism, slavery, sexual repression, and attitudes towards women in his day (1793). (Taken from The Blake Archive.)
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since September 12, 1999.