Introduction

Late in his life--evidently sometime after 1818 and in one case five months before his death in 1827--Blake prepared a few identically ordered copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, thus establishing the fifty-four plate sequence which has been made familiar through almost every facsimile and print edition of the Songs. So it is easy to forget that Blake had been assembling many copies of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience in sometimes very different combinations for thirty and twenty-five years--that, indeed, no copy of Songs of Innocence which he issued independently follows the conventional order.

The images of Songs of Innocence and of Experience here presented have been linked hypertextually, making it possible to proceed from any given poem to any other which followed it in any edition, looping through the various juxtapositions Blake created in the intratextual, echoing world of Songs. Editions of Songs of Innocence, usually distinguished by capital letters, are here referred to in lowercase (a-u), Songs of Innocence and of Experience in uppercase (A-AA), with the exception of the late, similarly sequenced copies (UWXYZAA) which are identified together as "@". For specific information regarding these various copies, the viewer should consult G. E. Bentley, Jr.'s magisterial discussion in Blake Books (Oxford 1977), pp. 364-432.

Of course, to loop in reality from poem to following poem in any edition would include an experience of different colorings and styles whose virtual approximation will have to wait for the Blake Archive. But detailed color images make for very large files which would, at present, work against the possibility of linking rapidly through the hypertext (as it is, 28.8 and under connections will not find it fast enough). The images here began as photographs of a monochromatic, posthumous copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience (copy b, at Harvard; previously published in facsimile by Ruthven Todd in 1947); these have been scanned, then reduced to single-bit black+white images and edited one pixel at a time to improve legibility. Each whole image of a plate (about 20K) offers a clickable map which will serve to bring up enlargements of each stanza or significant graphic. With each enlargement there is usually the option of advancing to the next stanza or of clicking on the enlargement to return to the whole plate. A few surprises and clickable-mapped enlargements are coded in along the way, to offer approaches to interpretation, and it is the goal of this ongoing project to add many more of these, as well as overt links to contextual material, existing interpretations, annotated bibliographies, sound files, and anything else likely to be of interest.

Begin with the opening of copies abcdefghijklmnopqrst or tu or EJLORSV@ or with an index.

"The Man who does not know The Beginning, never can know the End of Art"

--Annotations to Reynolds