The Healing Power of Blake: A Distillation (Diamonds for the Mind)

You agree that William Blake is a very great poet. But you've probably only ever read his earlier poems like The Tyger. You've looked at the hundreds of pages of his later so-called prophetic works, knowing that there his true greatness must lie. But you close them, intimidated by the sheer mass, and the strangeness and apparent incomprehensibility. So you retreat to the early, easy ones but you wonder . . . For this distillation I have chosen those passages from the prophetic works which are not only inviting and comprehensible, but which are the very gems of his genius. Here they are magnificent, and accessible. And furthermore, I have punctuated them (Blake left little punctuation) so as to encourage you to read them out aloud, to feel and know the glory of Blake.