Songs of Innocence - Illustrated by Honor C. Appleton

By William Blake and Honor C. Appleton

Originally published in 1912, Songs of Innocence, was written by the legendary William Blake (1757 – 1827), and illustrated with the stunning drawings of Honor Appleton. It is a collection of nineteen poems, including of ‘The Lamb’, ‘The Blossom’, ‘Night’, ‘Spring’, ‘Nurse’s Song’, and ‘The School-Boy’. The prequel to Songs of Experience, this book redefines our traditional notions of ‘paradise’ and ‘the fall’ – representing childhood a state of protected innocence rather than original sin, but not immune to the fallen world and its institutions.

Honor C. Appleton (1879 – 1951), was a master of the trade. During her lifetime, she illustrated over one-hundred-and-fifty books, with her most famous works including Our Nursery Rhyme Book (1912),Charles Perrault’s Fairy Tales (1919), and the collected Stories of Hans Christian Andersen (1922). As her career progressed, she began producing bolder images for literary classics, Songs of Innocence being a prime example of this progression. Presented alongside the text, Appleton’s enchanting creations serve to further refine and enhance William Blake’s masterful poetry – making this a book to be enjoyed and appreciated, by both young and old; ‘innocent’, and ‘experienced’.

Pook Press celebrates the great ‘Golden Age of Illustration‘ in children’s classics and fairy tales – a period of unparalleled excellence in book illustration. We publish rare and vintage Golden Age illustrated books, in high-quality colour editions, so that the masterful artwork and story-telling can continue to delight both young and old.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Apr 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781473391666

William Blake

William Blake (1757–1827) was an English poet and visual artist often linked to the Romantic movement. As a youth in London, he was primarily educated at home before becoming an engraver’s apprentice. Later, Blake would attend the Royal Academy and eventually find work in publishing. His debut, Poetical Sketches, was printed in 1783 followed by Songs of Innocence in 1789. The latter is arguably his most popular collection due to its vivid imagery and thought-provoking themes.

Book preview

Preface

THERE are few careers like Blake’s for teaching the importance of minorities. He was born under George II. in the year of Dyer’s Fleece and Wilkie’s Epigoniad. His first poems were issued in 1783, when Blair was still braying the Ars Poetica of Pope, and when the Pope in homespun, George Crabbe to wit, was just commencing his poetical career with The Village. Poetical Sketches came two years before Cowper’s Task, three years before the Kilmarnock Burns. Yet there had always been a nonconformist minority, a still, small voice of the spirit in revolt against the formal school who exalted the letter of verse against the spiritual essence of poetry; this last is not, as is sometimes held, absorbed by the creation of beauty in words, but is primarily concerned with the promulgation of original truth which has to be raised by emotion to a higher power than it is possible to express in prose. Thus, in the very year of Blake’s birth, 1757, Joseph Warton raised the symbol of revolt against the school of verse epigram and poetic diction in his famous Essay on A. Pope. The romantic renaissance had, in a sense, begun; and from its progenitors, above all, we may be sure, from Percy, Gray, Collins, Christopher Smart, Ossian, and last, but not least, Chatterton, William Blake derived both nutriment and direction. Few poets in their turn have influenced more of their craft than Blake. Like Spenser, he has proved a poet’s poet; but the influence was not immediate. Poets, like other great men, are apt to express the mood of a minority—often a very small minority. But Blake was amazingly isolated. Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and even the curio-connoisseur,