Essential Blake

From the introduction by Stanley Kunitz:

Blake speaks more directly to us, anticipating the issues, conflicts, and anxieties of the modern world, than any of his contemporaries. It could be argued that he dared, in fact, to be the first modern poet. . . .

Above all, Blake teaches us that the imagination is a portion of the divine principle, that "Energy is Eternal Delight," and that "everything that lives is Holy." Human liberty and imagination have never been better served.

Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1905 and educated at Harvard University. His numerous honors include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, and designation as State Poet of New York. He has edited the Yale Series of Younger Poets, served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and taught for many years in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. He is president of Poets House, New York, a founding father of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts. Recent publications include The Poems of Stanley Kunitz1928-1978 (Atlantic, 1979), Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (Atlantic, 1985), and Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected (Norton, 1995) for which he was awarded the 1995 National Book Award for Poetry.