Details
Synopsis
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.
| Size | | Length: | 399 pages | | Height: | 9.5 in | | Width: | 6.8 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 31.2 oz |
Industry Reviews
"[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."
New York Times Book Review - Penelope Fitzgerald (04/14/1996)
"...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."
Washington Post Book World - Paul Starobin (05/12/1996)
"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."
Los Angeles Times Book Review - John Banville (05/19/1996)
"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."
Whipple
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