It started at
the British Library in London. In the library’s shop, likely my favorite shop of
any institution in the city, I saw a pile of small (4 x 4 ¾ inches) books, each
for a pound. And right on top was one about poet William Blake, William
Blake’s Notebook, a little volume with drawings and notes from the
notebook the poet and artist kept from 1787 to his death in 1826.
I read the
little volume on the plane home. It would be equally accurate to say I looked
at it and read the captions; it includes an explanatory text by Jamie Andrews,
who works for the library and was the co-curator of the 2007 exhibition “William
Blake: Under the Influence.”
Shortly after I
returned home last fall, Harvard professor Leo
Damrosch published Eternity’s
Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake. Coincidence, I
thought. And then I discovered that one of my favorite popular history and
biography writers Peter
Ackroyd had published Blake:
A Biography in 1995.
I asked myself,
how much did I really know about Blake?
To continue
reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak
Poetry.
Illustration: Newton by William Blake.
