3 Review(s)

First published in 1927 by Frank Cass and Company Limited, London, the book is about William Blake, his symbols, and their meanings. Blake was an English engraver, artist, poet, visionary, and author of exquisite lyrics in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794). The book tries to indicate certain ways of approaching to the poetry of William Blake, in the hope that those who have some appreciation of that poetry, but only limited opportunities for close study of it, may be encouraged to follow their inclination still further. The values for which Plowman lived and died he set down, a credo if ever there was one, in this book. For although it is a book about Blake and his symbols and their meanings, it is something more; it goes beyond Blake and becomes universal and timeless, as Blake’s own work did. So, it is a book about religion, which Blake said was brotherhood; wherefore it is already far removed from the religion of the religious institutions as we know them, and the nearer to that of God, “the Divine Humanity”, the incarnation of the “Poetic Vision”. A book which imaginatively interprets another man’s writings, and so is not critical in the merely anatomical sense, is inevitably an account not only of the soul of the man whose writings it illumines, as this book is an account of Blake’s soul; it is also an account of the soul of him who interprets, as this book is account of Max Plowman’s.