Defining the text

Abstract

Over the last hundred years a large number of distinguished scholars have directed their energies to the editing of Blake’s literary work. The task they have undertaken has been an impossible one, since no printed text can adequately represent either a Blakean engraved book or a much-altered manuscript like that of The Four Zoas. Yet the impossible undertaking has also been necessary and valuable, because Blake’s writings present innumerable problems of the sort that are commonly addressed rather by editors than by critics. The first attempt to produce a complete edition of Blake’s work, that of EJ. Ellis and W.B. Yeats, was grossly inaccurate and is now more significant for students of Yeats than for students of Blake. The edition which established a generally reliable text was that of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, which appeared in three volumes in 1925. Keynes’s work has in some respects been superseded by that of later scholars, but in its time it was a historic achievement comparable with Grierson’s edition of Donne. In the context of this undertaking Songs of Innocence and Experience was a relatively unproblematic text; but a comparison of Keynes’s later one-volume editions of Blake’s writings reveals some of the special problems which an editor of that text has to face.