Blake’s Poetry and Designs: A Norton Critical Edition (review)

Mary Lynn Johnson’s and John E. Grant’s update of their 1979 Norton critical edition of Blake’s Poetry and Designs represents a significant step forward in the presentation of Blake’s work to the reading public. Consistent with newer Norton editions, Blake’s Poetry and Designs is more compact, colorful, and better typeset than the first edition. It also incorporates significant updates to its content, now arranged with the most widely circulated editions of Blake in mind: while their 1979 edition followed the chronological arrangement of Keynes’s edition of Blake—which had been the standard edition of Blake since 1925—the new edition follows the now-standard Erdman edition, placing the text of the illuminated books first and following it with manuscript material, marginalia, and then letters. However, the effect of this change is to shift from a study of Blake oriented around the development of his thought through time to a perhaps too focused emphasis upon the illuminated books.

This emphasis is reflected in the new edition in its inclusion of all of Jerusalem. The first edition had less than half of what is now considered Blake’s great work, so that all of Blake’s illuminated books are now presented in a Norton Critical Edition. Johnson and Grant expand For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise from only the concluding “To the Accuser Who is the God of This World” to the complete text, add Blake’s marginalia to Spurzheim’s Observations on Insanity, and approximately double the text of Blake’s letter to Thomas Butts of 26 April 1803. But where the editors giveth, the publishers taketh away: as a partial trade-off for the inclusion of all of Jerusalem, the editors cut all of Hayley’s letters from 1800 and approximately ten pages from their selections from Blake’s notebook, which is no longer thematically organized. The first edition’s sections on “Drafts” and “Love” from the notebook suffered the fewest cuts, while its section on “Visions” is about half its previous length and “Art and Artists” is barely represented at all.

The net effect of these cuts is to reduce the notebook to a reading companion to the illuminated books emphasizing the themes of sex, love, and vision, a reasonable decision given the new edition’s greater emphasis on the illuminated books and the consequent cuts. Johnson and Grant are not as concerned with separating Blake’s poetry from his prose as Erdman was, but I wish they had chosen to follow their original chronological arrangement of Blake’s work. As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of Erdman’s New and Revised Edition of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, a chronological presentation of Blake’s poetry and prose would now be a departure from Erdman’s norm, one conducive to the new approaches to Blake’s material which have been increasingly historically oriented.

One radical departure from all prior presentations of Blake is this edition’s reliance upon The William Blake Archive for transcriptions of the illuminated books (Erdman’s text, cross referenced with originals, is used for Blake’s other works). The William Blake Archive serves as an online companion to this edition, and is continually referenced in notes and introductory material. Reliance upon the archive for transcriptions brings readers closer to Blake’s self-published illuminated works as they appear in the material objects he actually produced. In the past, readers of Blake did not read Blake, but one editor’s ideal text developed from collating a number of variant prints. The new Norton edition for the first time presents the particularities of Blake’s individual manuscripts, bringing the reader as close as possible to Blake’s text as it would be read in one of the illuminated works themselves. The temptation to revise and correct Blake is for most editors of Blake difficult to overcome, but the Grants resist as much...