Blake Quarterly | Hell’s Printing Press

Guest post: Portrait of a poet with a book

17 October 2017

Today we have a guest post from Jonathan Morse of the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Jon sent us a message asking if we had a use for an image he’d found in the collections of the Library of Congress; his post is the result of that correspondence.

Between January and May 1920, William Butler Yeats toured the United States and Canada under the management of the J. B. Pond Lycaeum Lecture Bureau, addressing audiences on such topics as “The Irish Movement and the Irish Theatre” and “The Younger Generation.” By “the younger generation” he meant contemporary poets. So far as I have been able to learn from the newspaper coverage online at newspapers.com, in the Library of Congress, and in the archives of the student newspapers that covered his appearances at Oberlin and Yale, he never mentioned Blake.

Blake Quarterly, Publications

Reading around Jerusalem

1 August 2017

The archive has just published Jerusalem (F), printed in 1827 and now owned by the Morgan Library and Museum. Copy E (Yale Center for British Art), the sole representative of the work in the archive for more than a dozen years, now has company.

Blake Quarterly

A Last Hurrah

9 June 2017

Our last hurrahs are like singers’ farewell tours—they tend to come around again next year—but this is a farewell to our fiftieth volume, which officially ends on 30 June, even though we have already published all four issues.

Blake Quarterly

An Anniversary Letter to Blake Books

2 June 2017

There are many Blake books but only one Blake Books by G. E. Bentley, Jr., the catalogue of works and criticism that was first published forty years ago this year.

Blake Quarterly

Block Museum Exhibition Q&A

26 April 2017

The exhibition William Blake and the Age of Aquarius will open at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in a few months. I recently had the chance to ask some questions of Corinne Granof, the museum’s curator of academic programs. The conversation has been edited very slightly.

Blake Quarterly

The Fortunate “Un-“fortunate in BIQ Wordlists

24 April 2017

While still working through the S-Z wordlist of potential misspellings in Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, I have found myself amidst a list of “Un-” vocabulary. Almost exactly a year ago, I reflected on the isolation of “self” and its implications as I remediated words that required a hyphen, separating “self” from terms like “alienation,” “complicating,” “defeating,” and “deluding” by adding a hyphen that the OCR had mistakenly removed. And now that I’ve reached the end of my list, I reflect again on what this work teaches me about William Blake scholarship, and about language more generally.

Blake Quarterly

An Unexpected Encounter with Space Cat

14 April 2017

I could have told you that Ruthven Todd was a Blake scholar (here are his credits in early issues of Blake). I could even have told you that he lived in Spain (among other places), conducted printmaking experiments with Joan Miró, and that his papers are now at the University of Leeds. What I didn’t know until today is that he was also a children’s book author.

Blake Quarterly

Q&A with Naomi Billingsley

4 April 2017

If you are interested in Blake on Twitter, as I am in my @BlakeQuarterly incarnation, you’ll not go far before you come across interesting posts by Naomi Billingsley (@NAIBillingsley), which I often retweet. I recently asked Naomi if she would participate in a Q&A about her work.

Blake Quarterly

Book review: Paul Peucker, A Time of Sifting: Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety in the Eighteenth Century

1 March 2017

This review will appear in the spring 2017 issue of Blake. The reviewer is Marsha Keith Schuchard, the author of many articles and books on Blake and his circle. To the journal she has contributed “Blake’s Healing Trio: Magnetism, Medicine, and Mania,” “The Secret Masonic History of Blake’s Swedenborg Society,” and “Young William Blake and the Moravian Tradition of Visionary Art,” as well as an article with Keri Davies, “Recovering the Lost Moravian History of William Blake’s Family,” which is referenced below.

Blake Quarterly

Dante giveaway

3 February 2017

Last October we gave away a reproduction print, but we weren’t done there. To continue our celebration of volume 50 of the journal, we have a copy of the Trianon Press facsimile of Blake’s Dante engravings, which was published in 1978 for the William Blake Trust. For this we are very grateful to John Windle, who donated it for the giveaway.