Poetical Sketches is the first collection of poetry and prose by William Blake, written between 1769 and 1777. Forty copies were printed in 1783 with the help of Blake's friends, the artist John Flaxman and the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew, at the request of his wife Harriet Mathew. The book was never published for the public, with copies instead given as gifts to friends of the author and other interested parties. Of the forty copies, fourteen were accounted for at the time of Geoffrey Keynes' census in 1921.Margaret Ruth Lowery, "A Census of Copies of William Blake's Poetical Sketches, 1783", The Library, Fourth Series, 17:3 (Autumn, 1936), 354-360 A further eight copies had been discovered by the time of Keynes' The Complete Writings of William Blake in 1957.Keynes (1966: 883) In March 2011, a previously unrecorded copy was sold at auction in London for £72,000.
Publication The original 1783 copies were seventy-two pages in length, printed in octavo by John Flaxman's aunt, who owned a small print shop in the Strand, and paid for by Anthony Stephen Mathew and his wife Harriet, dilettantes to whom Blake had been introduced by Flaxman in early 1783.Ackroyd (1995: 94) Each individual copy was hand-stitched, with a grey back and a blue cover, reading "POETICAL SKETCHES by W.B." It was printed without a table of contents and many pages were without half titles. Of the twenty-two extant copies, eleven contain corrections in Blake's handwriting.Erdman (1982: 846) Poetical Sketches is one of only two works by Blake to be printed conventionally with typesetting; the only other extant work is The French Revolution in 1791, which was to be published by Joseph Johnson. However, it never got beyond the proof copy and was thus not actually published.
Even given the modest standards by which the book was published, it was something of a failure. Alexander Gilchrist noted that the publication contained several obvious misreadings and numerous errors in punctuation, suggesting that it was printed with little care and was not proofread by Blake (thus the numerous handwritten corrections in printed copies). Gilchrist also notes that it was never mentioned in the Monthly Review, even in the magazine's index of "Books noticed", which listed every book published in London each month, signifying that the publication of the book had gone virtually unnoticed.Gilchrist (1998: 42) Nevertheless, Blake himself was proud enough of the volume that he was still giving copies to friends as late as 1808, and when he died, several unstitched copies were found amongst his belongings.
After the initial 1783 publication, Poetical Sketches as a volume remained unpublished until R. H. Shepherd's edition in 1868.Bentley and Nurmi (1964: 55) However, prior to that, several of the individual poems had been published in journals and anthologised by Blake's early biographers and editors.In Part I of A Blake Bibliography, Bentley and Nurmi give an extensive publication history of each poem. For example, Benjamin Heath Malkin included 'Song: "How sweet I roam'd from field to field"' and 'Song: "I love the jocund dance"' in A Father's Memoirs of his Child (1806), Allan Cunningham published 'Gwin, King of Norway' and 'To the Muses' in Lives of the most eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1830), and Alexander Gilchrist included 'Song: "When early morn walks forth in sober grey"' in his Life of William Blake (1863). Gilchrist, however, did not reproduce Blake's text verbatim, instead incorporating several of his own emendations. Many subsequent editors of Blake included extracts in their collections of his poetry, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, A. C. Swinburne, W. B. Yeats and E. J. Ellis, also introduced their own emendations. Due to the extreme rarity of the original publication, these emendations often went unnoticed, thus giving rise to a succession of variant readings on the original content. Subsequent versions repeated or added to these changes, despite what later commentators described as obvious misreadings. However, in 1905, John Sampson produced the first scholarly edition of Blake's work, in which he returned to the original texts, also taking into account Blake's own handwritten corrections. As such, most modern editors tend to follow Sampson's example and use the original 1783 publication as their control text.For more information on the variations between different editions, see the collations in, for example, Sampson (1905), Keynes (1957 and 1966), Erdman (1965 and 1982), Ostriker (1977) and Stevenson (1971, 1989 and 2007)
Influences and importance Blake's literary influences in Poetical Sketches include, amongst others, Elizabethan poetry, Shakespearean drama, John Milton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Fletcher, Thomas Gray, William Collins, Thomas Chatterton, Edmund Spenser, James Thomson's The Seasons (1726–1730), Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), James Macpherson's Ossian (1761–1765) and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Blake shows especial antipathy towards the closed couplet of Augustan poetry.Ostriker (1977: 870)
Although scholars are generally in agreement that Poetical Sketches is far from Blake's best work, it does occupy an important position in Blakean studies, coming as it does at the very outset of his career. In 1947, for example, Northrop Frye declared in Fearful Symmetry that although Poetical Sketches is not regarded as a great piece of work, "it is of the highest importance to us, partly because it shows Blake's symbolic language in an emergent and transitional form, and partly because it confirms that Blake is organically part of his literary age."Frye (1947: 177)
Writing in 1965, S. Foster Damon concurs with Frye's opinion. In the entry for Poetical Sketches in Damon's Blake Dictionary, he refers to Sketches as "a book of the revolutionary period, a time of seeking for non-neoclassical inspiration, a preparation for the Romantic period [...] For all the derivative material, the book is a work of genius in its daring figures, its metrical experiments, its musical tone."Damon (1988: 331) Damon also writes, "Historically, Blake belongs – or began – in the Revolutionary generation, when the closed heroic couplet was exhausted, and new subjects and new rhythms were being sought out. The cadences of the Bible, the misunderstood Milton and the poetic Shakespeare with his fellow Elizabethans were Blake's staples from the first; to them we must add the wildness of Ossian, the music of Chatterton, the balladry of Percy's Reliques, and the Gothic fiction of Walpole. All the principles of Romanticism are to be found in Blake's first book."Damon (1988: 332)
Harold Bloom is also in agreement with this assessment, seeing the book as very much of its particular epoch; a period he dates from the death of Alexander Pope in 1744 to the first major poetry of William Wordsworth in 1789. Bloom sees Sketches as "a workshop of Blake's developing imaginative ambitions as he both follows the poets of sensibility in their imitations of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, and goes beyond them in venturing more strenuously on the Hebraic sublime [...] Perhaps the unique freshness of Poetical Sketches can be epitomised by noting Blake's first achievements in the greatest of his projects: to give definite form to the strong workings of imagination that produced the cloudy sublime images of the earlier poets of sensibility. In the best poems of Blake's youth, the sublime feelings of poets like Gray and Collins find a radiant adequacy of visionary outline."Harold Bloom, "Commentary" in Erdman (1982: 967-968)
Frye, Damon and Bloom are all in agreement that Blake was, at least originally, very much of his age, but this is by no means a universally accepted opinion. Peter Ackroyd, for example, sees the poems as fundamentally divorced from the dominant poetic formulas of the day. Speaking of 'To the Evening Star' in specific and Poetical Sketches in general, Ackroyd argues that "it would be quite wrong to approach Blake's poetry with a Romantic belief that he is engaged in an act of confessional lyricism or brooding introversion [...] This is not the poetry of a melancholy or self-absorbed youth."Ackroyd (1995: 54)
Susan J. Wolfson goes even further, seeing the volume as a statement of Blake's antipathy towards the conventions of the day and an expression of his own sense of artistic aloofness; "He serves up stanzas that cheerfully violate their paradigms, or refuse rhyme, or off-rhyme, or play with eye-rhymes; rhythms that disrupt metrical convention, and line-endings so unorthodox as to strain a practice of enjambment already controversial in eighteenth century poetics."Wolfson (2003: 68)
Similarly, W. H. Stevenson argues that "there is little direct borrowing, and it would be truer to say that, even at this early stage, he is experimenting with verse forms and has formed for himself a style as individual as Collin's and Akenside's".Stevenson (2007: 3)
Contents Poetical Sketches consists of nineteen lyric poems, a dramatic fragment (King Edward the Third), a prologue to another play in blank verse ('Prologue, Intended for a dramatic piece of King Edward the Fourth'), a prose poem prologue ('Prologue to King John'), a ballad ('A War Song to Englishmen') and three prose poems ('The Couch of Death', 'Contemplation', and 'Samson').
The nineteen lyric poems are grouped together under the title "Miscellaneous Poems":
'To Spring' 'To Summer' 'To Autumn' 'To Winter' 'To the Evening Star' 'To Morning' 'Fair Elenor' 'Song: "How sweet I roam'd from field to field'" 'Song: "My silks and fine array'" 'Song: "Love and harmony combine'" 'Song: "I love the jocund dance'" 'Song: "Memory, hither come'" 'Mad Song' 'Song: "Fresh from the dewy hill, the merry year'" 'Song: "When early morn walks forth in the sober grey'" 'To the Muses' 'Gwin, King of Norway' 'An Imitation of Spencer' 'Blind-man's Buff'
The work begins with an 'Advertisement' which explains that the contents were written by Blake in his youth and, therefore, any "irregularities and defects" should be forgiven:
According to J.T. Smith, the advertisement was written by "Henry Mathew", which most critics take to mean Anthony Stephen Mathew; "Mrs Mathew was so extremely zealous in promoting the celebrity of Blake, that upon hearing him read some of his earlier efforts in poetry, she thought so well of them as to request the Rev. Henry Mathew, her husband, to join Mr. Flaxman in his truly kind offer of defraying the expense of printing them; in which he not only acquiesced, but with his usual urbanity, wrote the following advertisement."From J.T. Smith, A Book for a Rainy Day (1845), quoted in Bentley (1975: 48)
The following year, in 1784, Flaxman sounded a similar sentiment in a letter to William Hayley accompanying a copy of the book; "his education will plead sufficient excuse to your liberal mind for the defects of his work."
'To Spring', 'To Summer', 'To Autumn', 'To Winter'