Category
In October I noticed (thanks to a Twitter post celebrating National Opera Week) that Opera Omaha (@operaomaha) is developing a work based on the life of Blake. Stranger from Paradise (the working title) will premiere in May 2017. The librettist and director, Kevin Lawler, very kindly agreed to answer my questions about his inspiration and the production.
Continue reading
At the end of October the Blake Archive added forty-five back issues of the Blake Quarterly to the digital archive of the journal (I wrote about the creation of this wing of the Blake Archive here). Now every issue from spring 1990 (vol. 23, no. 4) to our five-year subscription paywall is freely accessible in both HTML and PDF, with the original black-and-white images replaced where possible in the HTML versions with color images from the archive. This new batch of issues includes frequently requested articles such as Marsha Keith Schuchard’s “The Secret Masonic History of Blake’s Swedenborg Society.”
The Blake Quarterly published its spring issue recently. It includes our annual “Blake in the Marketplace” feature by Robert N. Essick (who’s also one of the editors of the Blake Archive). “Marketplace” is always hefty on details but light in tone; there are lots of illustrations and the illustration captions, often in the form of mini-essays, are legendary. Elsewhere in the issue, Paul Miner explores Blake’s attitude to royalty (George III, Charlotte, and Marie Antoinette) and Jeff Mertz reviews Karl Kroeber’s Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies, written at the end of his life and brought to fruition by his former student Joseph Viscomi. Lastly, Joseph Wittreich uses two recently published books about William Hayley (one a collection of essays and the other a selection of his poetry) to discuss not only Hayley but also the reception history of Milton.
The Blake Quarterly site is www.blakequarterly.org.
Continue reading
Sometimes we hear of worthy projects for which funds are being raised, such as the Blake Society’s initiative to purchase Blake’s cottage in Felpham. Another, on a slightly smaller scale, came to our attention recently. The following is excerpted from the original message:
My name is Gaelen Armstrong – I’m a Canadian metal artist currently residing in the US. My collaborator and I are admirers of William Blake, and we’re designing a project for reproducing Blake’s Ancient of Days as large copper bas reliefs.
Our Ancient of Days will be roughly 2′ x 4′ (x 3.5″, at its greatest depth), and will be pure copper. We’ll finish them with our handmade patinas and a variety of gold, silver, and brass brushplating. Each piece will be unique and substantial. We’ve made over 150 pieces of copper art together, and we’re excited to take on Blake’s masterpiece.
We’ve created a Kickstarter campaign to cover the last few materials needed to bring the project to fruition. Though there are a variety of rewards for smaller pledges, those who pledge $1500 or more will receive their own 2′ x 4′ relief of the Ancient of Days.
As a side note, pledges on Kickstarter are noted but no funds change hands unless the project meets its funding goal by the campaign’s deadline. (So there’s no risk of supporting a project that only gets partial funding, and therefore remains unfulfilled.)
The link for the campaign is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/350052336/william-blakes-ancient-of-days-in-copper-silver-an. It runs until 8 May 2015.
Continue readingIn December the Blake Archive opened a new “wing” <http://bq.blakearchive.org> dedicated to back issues of the Blake Quarterly journal (the archive and quarterly have an editor in common, Morris Eaves, so it’s a natural marriage). The first installment covers issues from 2000-09, presented in both HTML and PDF versions.
Continue readingI’ve written before about my ongoing project of compiling a “master list” of the present locations for all of Blake’s correspondence. To collect all of this data, I’ve scoured a tall stack of fat books and a lot of online catalogues. The baseline for this list is the work info that we’ve already verified on the Blake Archive: both for letters that we’ve published and for those that are on deck for publication. Locating the rest of the letters has taken (and is still taking) some hunting around.
Continue readingAn exhibition curated by the Blake scholar Michael Phillips is opening at the Ashmolean in just over a month and will run until March. It will contain works from a number of institutions, as well as a recreation of Blake’s studio from his time at Hercules Buildings in Lambeth. There are lots of associated events being planned, most notably an Inspired by Blake festival in Oxford for two weeks in January.
Many thanks to Theresa Nicolson at the Ashmolean for sending us the flier:
The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of a fully searchable electronic edition of Blake’s 116 water color illustrations to Thomas Gray’s poems. The Archive first published these designs in April 2005 in our Preview mode. This republication substantially increases the number and range of Blake’s pictorial motifs available for searching on the Archive.
Continue reading
Milton copy D, pl. 36. Library of Congress (image from the Blake Archive).
Blake was full of optimism and sea air when he wrote to John Flaxman after he and Catherine arrived at the cottage in Felpham (though he did remark on the amount of luggage—mostly his stuff, not hers). He immortalized it in Milton pl. 36 and is now immortalized in turn by a blue plaque on the wall. A postcard from the early twentieth century shows the house surrounded by cruciferous vegetables in a scene rather more prosaic than that depicted by Blake.
Continue readingBeing British, one of my favourite pastimes is talking about the weather (usually in a tone of complaint whilst drinking a cup of tea, of course), and I’ve always considered myself to be rather good at it — that is, until I moved to western New York. The Rochester snow makes a bit of British rain seem like a pleasant shower, a February blizzard makes London fog charmingly atmospheric and the dramatic temperature fluctuations make grabbing your coat in the morning as simple as remembering to brush your teeth. This week, for example, has seen alterations in weather from 80 degrees and sunshine to 25 degrees and snow (27° to -3° for our Celsius-loving readers). Anyway, as I was thinking this over, I started wondering what Blake thought about the weather.
Continue reading