Blake, Young, and the Poetics of the Composite Page

This essay analyzes William Blake's "composite art," a practice that staged the separation of text and illustration, tracing his successive experiments with Edward Young's Night Thoughts, from the extraillustrated volumes of 537 watercolors to the illustrated edition published by Richard Edwards in 1797 and the recycling of proofs in Vala or The Four Zoas. The shifting relationship between letterpress and illustration in the extraillustrated volume and the 1797 edition, and the function of proofs as units of composition, shed light on the archaeology of bookmaking and its impact on the composition of the manuscript.