The Gates of Paradise, were first published in a limited run in 1793, Blake later changed the title to For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, and added several more drawings as well as a preface and concluding verse, publishing this version in 1818. The seventeen emblematic drawings and their commentaries depict the life of man from birth to death: passage through the four elements (water, earth, wind and fire), hatching as a child from the "mundane shell," encountering women, reaching for the moon of love ("I want, I want"), falling into Time's Ocean. After several other episodes he finally arrives at the death's door with Job's words: "I have said to the Worm: Thou art my mother and my sister." There a female figure is "Weaving to Dreams the Sexual strife, And Weeping over the Web of Life." William Blake (1757 – 1827) was a British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. Blake proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th-century. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.

Poetry.

This edition includes almost all Blake's substantive variants with the exception of some in the exceptionally complex manuscript of Vala, or the Four Zoas.

Over the last ten years the field of Blake studies has profited from new discoveries about Blake's life and work. This book examines the effect that Blake's mother's recently discovered Moravianism has had on our understanding of his poetry, and gives special attention to Moravianism and Swedenborgianism and their relation to his sexual politics. This is accomplished by a close reading of Blake's poetry, which examines in detail the subjects of religion, sex, and the attempted colonization of Africa by a Swedenborgian utopian group.

First published in 2002. This is a collection of topics of A.W.Mellon Lectures of fine Arts stemming from 1962 on the works of Blake. This volume looks at Blake’s work in three discussions; Reason, Perception and ‘What is Man’. Includes poems such as The Tyger, The Ancient Trees and The Sickness of Albion.