Summary
Peter Ackroyd has written an intellectual biography of William Blake, placing the artist in the context of his times and explicating Blake's unique vision as it was expressed in his work. He sees Blake as a perceptive social critic whose epic poems offer a vision of spiritual renewal.
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Media Reviews
"Ackroyd's biography of William Blake represents an achievement of composite method fully in the poet's own spirit-it's a work so sensitive to its subject, it seems to have conjured him from the beyond."
-- Kirkus
"[Mr. Ackroyd] is there at your elbow, a brilliant guide and interpreter....This is emphatically not a political biography. Its object isn't to enlist Blake as a primitive Marxist, but to show him as an individual of genius, awkward to deal with, sometimes nervous, often contradictory, but incorruptible." -- Penelope Fitzgerald
-- New York Times Book Review
"...where should an ordinary reader, enchanted by the simpler poems or the sardonic proverbs of 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'...go to begin exploring Blake's complex universe? Peter Ackroyd's new biography provides just the right starting place. Without being pedantic, it covers the basic facts of Blake's life, offers dozens of superb reproductions...and blithely eschews lengthy analyses of the verse. Instead Ackroyd emphasizes Blake the visionary Londoner, like Turner or Dickens, and convincingly relates the poet's work to the social upheavals of his time." -- Paul Starobin
-- Washington Post Book World
"There have been a number of biographies of William Blake...but surely Peter Ackroyd is the natural chronicler of his days and doings....Ackroyd devotes much of his space to a detailed consideration of Blake as an artist of profound originality and significance." -- John Banville
-- Los Angeles Times Book Review
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published date: 1997
Size: 6.25 x 9.75 inches
Weight: 1.05 pounds
Publisher's Notes
"MARVELOUS . . . A first-rate biography of an extraordinary man." --The Wall Street Journal "SUPERB . . . Ackroyd writes with clarity and ease: His book is consistently intelligent, entertaining and affectionate. One closes its pages full of admiration for Blake and eager to study his pictures and read his poetry. . . . Ackroyd emphasizes Blake the visionary Londoner, like Turner or Dickens, and convincingly relates the poets work to the social upheavals of his time. . . . Above all, [he] makes Blake live for the modern reader." --The Washington Post Book World "LYRICAL AND ILLUMINATING . . . Ackroyd is a masterly storyteller and interpreter of Blakes writing and art." --Chicago Tribune "THE WORK OF A WRITER AT THE PEAK OF HIS LITERARY POWERS . . . It is one of the great strengths of Ackroyd's writing that he reminds us that every individual life and cast of mind has a tradition behind it, a context of other lives and minds which is half forgotten or not remembered at all. As a writer, he is always letting his bucket deeper and deeper down the historical well." --The New Yorker
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