EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The selections for this volume have been taken
almost entirely from the “Nonesuch Press” edition of Blake’s
complete writings in poetry and prose, edited by Geoffrey Keynes,
(Nonesuch Press, London; Random House, New York). I cannot easily
express my indebtedness to Dr. Keynes, who did the real work for
this volume, and to his American publishers, Random House, Inc.,
who have facilitated its publication. The selections from Crabb
Robinson’s Reminiscences have been taken from Arthur
Symons’s supplement to his William Blake, London, 1907,
where the notes on Blake were printed as a separate unit for the
first time.
I should like to express my indebtedness to John
Sampson’s edition of Blake’s “Poetical Works” (Oxford University
Press), for guidance in making my own selections from The Four
Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem, I am equally indebted to D.
J. Sloss and J. P. R. Wallis, editors of the Clarendon Press
(Oxford, 1926) edition of Blake’s Prophetic Writings in two
volumes. Without their editorial analysis, list of variants and
unique glossary of Blake’s symbols, my own work would have been far
more difficult.
I owe a great debt to many pioneer scholars in
the field of Blake scholarship. In particular I should like to
acknowledge, with gratitude and pleasure, the work of Swinburne;
Joseph Wicksteed; S. Foster Damon; Max Plowman; Alexander
Gilchrist; Mona Wilson; Arthur Symons; William Butler Yeats; John
Sampson; Ruthven Todd; Geoffrey Grigson; J. Bronowski.
I should like to thank Pascal Covici for
suggesting this work, and for his friendly encouragement. I am
deeply grateful to Dr. Ruth Bunzel for many valuable suggestions. I
owe much to John Marshall and David Stevens of the Rockefeller
Foundation, and to Louis Wright and the staff of the Huntington
Library, San Marino, California, for making possible a study of
Blake manuscripts. And emphatically not least, I should like to
thank here my students and friends at Black Mountain College, North
Carolina, with whom I read Blake in the Fall quarter, 1944.
A. K.