William Blake

TO AUGUSTE RODIN whose work is the marriage of heaven and hell
CONTENTS
It was when Mr. Sampson's edition of Blake came into my hands in the winter of 1905 that the idea of writing a book on Blake first presented itself to me. From a boy he had been one of my favorite poets, and I had heard a great deal about him from Mr. Yeats as long ago as 1893, the year in which he and Mr. Ellis brought out their vast encyclopaedia, The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical. From that time to this Blake has never been out of my mind, but I have always hesitated to write down anything on a subject so great in itself, and already handled by great poets. Things have been written about Blake by Rossetti which no one will ever surpass; and in Mr. Swinburne's book Blake himself seems to speak again, as through the mouth of a herald. I read these, I read everything that had been written about him; gradually I got to know all his work, in all its kinds; and when I found, in Mr. Sampson's book, the rarest part of his genius, disentangled at last from the confusions of the commentators, I caught some impulse—was it from the careful enthusiasm of this editor, or perhaps straight from Blake?—and began to write down what now filled and overflowed my mind. Having begun on an impulse, I laid my plans as strictly as I could, and decided to make a book which would be, in its way, complete. There was to be, first, my own narrative, containing, as briefly as possible, every fact of importance, with my own interpretation of what I took to be Blake's achievements and intentions. But this was to be followed by a verbatim reprint of documents. These documents were the material of Gilchrist, but, even after Gilchrist's use of them, they remain of primary and undiminished importance: they are the main evidence in our case.
The documents which form the second part of my book contain every personal account of Blake which was printed during his lifetime, and between the time of his death and the publication of Gilchrist's Life in 1863, together with the complete text of every reference to Blake in the Diary, Letters, and Reminiscences of Crabb Robinson, transcribed for the first time from the original manuscripts. All these I have given exactly as they stand, not correcting their errors, for even errors have their value as evidence. The only other document of the period which exists was written by Frederick Tatham, within two years of the appearance of Cunningham's Life , and bound up at the beginning of a colored copy of Blake's Jerusalem , now in the possession of Captain Archibald Stirling. This manuscript was consulted by Mr. Swinburne and afterwards by Mr. Ellis and Mr. Yeats; but though many extracts have been made from it, it was printed for the first time by Mr. Archibald G. B. Russell in his edition of The Letters of William Blake (Methuen, 1906). This very important volume completes the task which I have here undertaken: the reprint of every record of Blake from contemporary sources.