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English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology (Dover Thrift Editions) by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and a great selection of related books, art and collectibles available now at AbeBooks.com.

1. ANTHOLOGY OF POETRY G.C.E. (A/L) ENGLISH (To be implemented from 2017) 1 INDEX 1) Sonnet 73 - William Shakespeare 2) Sonnet 141 - William Shakespeare 3) Batter My Heart (Holy Sonnet 14) - John Donne 4) Song: Go And Catch A Falling Star - John Donne. William Blake When my mother died I was very young.
2. The only problem with this anthology is the absence of some favorite titles of the major Romantic poets, mainly the shorter poems. Examples are Shelley's 'Ozymandias' and Keats' 'When I Have Fears.' A plus in this anthology is the inclusion of other Romantics other than the 'Big Five: WCBKS.' Also, Blake's shorter poems are covered thoroughly.

William Blake (1757-1827), English artist, mystic and poet wrote Songs of Innocence (1789): a poetry collection written from the child’s point of view, of innocent wonderment and spontaneity in natural settings which includes “Little Boy Lost”, “Little Boy Found” and “The Lamb”;

Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Songs of Experience (1794) contains many poems in response to ones from Innocence, suggesting ironic contrasts as the child matures and learns of such concepts as fear and envy. For example, to “The Lamb” comes the predatory “The Tyger”;

And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Later editions would see Innocence and Experience contained in one volume. As a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Thomas Paine, Blake was among the literati of London’s intellectual circle though he was often labeled an eccentric or worse, insane or demented. His works did not gain much acclaim or commercial success until long after his death. Although he had several patrons over the course of his life and produced voluminous works, he often lived in abject poverty. Though it is hard to classify Blake’s body of work in one genre, he heavily influenced the Romantic poets with recurring themes of good and evil, heaven and hell, knowledge and innocence, and external reality versus inner. Going against common conventions of the time, Blake believed in sexual and racial equality and justice for all, rejected the Old Testament’s teachings in favour of the New, and abhorred oppression in all its forms. He focused his creative efforts beyond the five senses, for, If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.—from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell written between 1790-93, which inspired the title of Aldous Huxley’s essay “The Doors of Perception” (1954).

As an artist Blake admired and studied the works of Raphael, Heemskerk, Dürer, and Michelangelo, who would become important influences to the fantastic and at times apocalyptic illustrations he created for his own writings and others’. From his c.1803 poem “The Mental Traveler”—I traveld thro’ a Land of Men, A Land of Men & Women too, And heard & saw such dreadful things, As cold Earth wanderers never knew. He developed mythic creatures inspired by Greek and Roman mythology including Los, who represents the poetic imagination; Albion, who represents England; and Orc, who embodies youthful rebelliousness. His illustrations for the Bible’s “Book of Revelations” include ‘The Great Red Dragon’ (Satan) made famous most recently in Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon (1981). While Blake lived the majority of his life in London, he exerted a profound impact on future poets, artists, writers, and musicians the world over.

William Blake was born on 28 November, 1757, in London, England, the third son of Catherine née Wright (1723–1792) and James Blake (c.1723–1784) a hosier and haberdasher on Broad Street in Golden Square, Soho. Young William was prone to fantastic visions, including seeing God, and angels in a tree. He would later claim that he had regular conversations with his deceased brother Robert. It was soon apparent that Blake’s internal world of imagination would be a prime motivator throughout his life. Noting something special in their son the Blakes were highly supportive of and encouraged his artistic creativity and thus began his education and development as an artist.

He had early shown an interest in and aptitude for drawing, so, at the age of ten Blake entered Henry Pars’ drawing school. Then, at the age of fourteen Blake started a seven year apprenticeship with engraver James Basire, the official engraver to the Society of Antiquaries. From his bustling shop on Queen Street, Blake learned all the tools of the trade that would become his main source of income. He was often sent out on assignments to create sketches and drawings of statues, paintings, and monuments including those found in churches like Westminster Abbey. The intense study of Gothic art and architecture appealed to Blake’s aesthetic sensibility and brought out his penchant for the medieval. He also met numerous figures from London’s intellectual circle during this period. After attending the Royal Academy under Sir Joshua Reynolds for a time Blake left because he found the intellectual atmosphere there too restrictive to his burgeoning artistic side. In 1780 he obtained employment as an engraver with publisher Joseph Johnson.

In 1782 Blake married Catherine Sophia Boucher (1762-1831). Although they had no children it was mostly a happy marriage and Blake taught Catharine to read and write. They were a devoted couple and worked together on many of Blake’s publications. He had been writing poetry for quite some time and his first collection, Poetical Sketches, appeared in 1783. While Blake was busy with commissions he also undertook the task of creating the engravings that would illustrate his own poetry, and he also printed them himself. He experimented with an early method of creating images and text on the same plate. His highly detailed illustrations often focus on parts of the human anatomy or fantastically imaginative creatures surrounded by various natural forms. Often tackling difficult metaphorical themes, his characters embodying inspiration and creativity do battle with oppressive forces like law and religion. He employed techniques for decorative margins and hand-coloured the printed images, or printed with the colour already on the wood or copper plate, the paint of which he mixed himself. This attention to the craft and details of each volume make no two of his works alike. He also illustrated works for other writers and poets including Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Original Stories from Real Life (1788).

The Book of Thel (1789), one of Blake’s first long narrative poems, was followed by the first of his prophetical works, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c.1793). Other works finished around this time were America: A Prophesy (1793), Europe: A Prophesy (1794), Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), and The Book of Urizen (1794).

In 1800, the Blakes moved to Felpham in Sussex where William was commissioned to illustrate works by his then patron, poet William Hayley. In 1803 Blake was charged with sedition after a violent confrontation with soldier John Scolfield in which Blake uttered treasonable remarks against the King. He was later acquitted. In 1805 he started his series of illustrations for the Book of Revelations and various other publications including Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th Century Canterbury Tales, Robert John Thornton’s Virgil and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton: A Poem was published around 1811. Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (c.1820) is Blake’s longest illuminated work.

In 1821 the Blakes moved to lodgings in Fountain Court, Strand. There he finished his work on the Book of Job in 1825, commissioned by his last patron John Linnell. The following year he started a series of watercolours for Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, which he worked on up to the day of his death. William Blake died at home on 12 August, 1827. Unable to pay for a funeral, Linnell loaned the money to Catherine. Blake was buried in an unmarked grave in the Non-Conformist Bunhill Fields in London where Catherine was buried four years later among other notable figures of dissent like Daniel Defoe and John Bunyan. A grave marker now stands near to where they were buried. In 1957 a memorial to Blake and his wife was erected in Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, London.

I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create—Jerusalem

Biography written by C.D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc. 2006. All Rights Reserved.

The above biography is copyrighted. Do not republish it without permission.

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The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (the AQA) has produced Anthologies for GCSE English and English Literature studied in English schools. This follows on from AQA's predecessor organisations; Northern Examinations and Assessment Board (NEAB) and Southern Examining Group (SEG).

William Blake Anthology Pdffasrmen Box Set

2004 Anthology[edit]

The first AQA Anthology was a collection of poems and short texts. The anthology was split into several sections covering poems from other cultures, the poetry of Seamus Heaney,^[1]Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage, and a bank of pre-1914 poems. There was also a section of prose pieces, which could have been studied in schools which had chosen not to study a separate set text.

English: Poems from Other Cultures[edit]

GCSE English students studied all of the poems in either cluster and answered a question on them in Section A of Paper 2. In 2005, Andrew Cunningham, an English teacher at Charterhouse School complained in the Telegraph that the inclusion of the poems represented an 'obsession with multi-culturalism'.^[2]

Cluster 1[edit]

• Edward Kamau Brathwaite: 'Limbo'
• Tatamkhulu Afrika: 'Nothing's Changed'
• Grace Nichols: 'Island Man'
• Imtiaz Dharker: 'Blessing'
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti: 'Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People In A Mercedes'
• Nissim Ezekiel: 'Night of the Scorpion'
• Chinua Achebe: 'Vultures'
• Denise Levertov: 'What Were They Like?'

Cluster 2[edit]

• Sujata Bhatt: 'Search for My Tongue'
• Tom Leonard: 'Unrelated Incidents'
• John Agard: 'Half Caste'
• Derek Walcott: 'Love After Love'
• Imtiaz Dharker: 'This Room'
• Niyi Osundare: 'Not My Business'
• Moniza Alvi: 'Presents from my 'Aunts' in Pakistan'
• Grace Nichols: 'Hurricane Hits England'

William Blake Anthology Pdffasrmen Books

English Literature: Poetry[edit]

Seamus Heaney[edit]

• 'Storm on the Island'
• 'Perch'
• 'Blackberry-Picking'
• 'Death of a Naturalist'
• 'Digging'
• 'Mid-Term Break'
• 'Follower'
• 'At a Potato Digging'

Gillian Clarke[edit]

• 'Catrin'
• 'Baby-sitting'
• 'Mali'
• 'A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998'
• 'The Field Mouse'
• 'October'
• 'On The Train'
• 'Cold Knap Lake'

Carol Ann Duffy[edit]

• 'Havisham'
• 'Elvis's Twin Sister'
• 'Anne Hathaway'
• 'Salome'
• 'We Remember Your Childhood Well'
• 'Before You Were Mine'
• 'Education for Leisure' - removed from Anthology
• 'Stealing'

Simon Armitage[edit]

• from Book of Matches, “Mother, any distance greater than a single span”
• from Book of Matches, “My father thought it...”
• 'Homecoming'
• 'November'
• 'Kid'
• from Book of Matches, “Those bastards in their mansions”
• from Book of Matches, “I've made out a will; I'm leaving myself”
• 'Hitcher'
• 'The Manhunt'

Pre-1914 Poetry Bank[edit]

• Ben Jonson: 'On My First Sonne'
• William Butler Yeats: 'The Song of the Old Mother'
• William Wordsworth: 'The Affliction of Margaret'
• William Blake: 'The Little Boy Lost' and 'The Little Boy Found'
• Charles Tichborne: 'Tichborne's Elegy'
• Thomas Hardy: 'The Man He Killed'
• Walt Whitman: 'Patrolling Barnegat'
• William Shakespeare: Sonnet 130 - 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun'
• Robert Browning: 'My Last Duchess'
• Robert Browning: 'The Laboratory'
• Alfred Tennyson: 'Ulysses'
• Oliver Goldsmith: 'The Village Schoolmaster'
• Alfred Tennyson: 'The Eagle'
• John Clare: Sonnet - “I love to see the summer...”
• Percy Bysshe Shelley: 'Ozymandias'

English Literature: Prose[edit]

• Doris Lessing: 'Flight'
• Sylvia Plath: 'Superman and Paula Brown's New Snowsuit'
• Michèle Roberts: 'Your Shoes'
• Joyce Cary: 'Growing Up'
• Ernest Hemingway: 'The End of Something'
• Graham Swift: 'Chemistry'
• Leslie Norris: 'Snowdrops'

2008 Anthology[edit]

In 2008 the Anthology was reissued without 'Education for Leisure' following complaints about its reference to knives and concerns about rising levels of knife crime in schools.^[3] In the new Anthology the poem was replaced with a 'This page is left intentionally blank' notice. After removing 'Education for Leisure' from the anthology the exam board was accused of censorship.^[4]

2015 Anthology[edit]

The third anthology was produced for first assessment in 2017.

The anthology includes poems under the heading 'Moon on the Tides' and prose under the heading 'Sunlight on the Grass'.^[5] Some of the poems are by authors of poems in the first anthology such as Agard and Armitage.

Poems[edit]

• 'The Clown Punk' by Simon Armitage
• 'Checking Out Me History' by John Agard
• 'Horse Whisperer' by Andrew Forster
• 'Medusa' by Carol Ann Duffy
• 'Singh Song!' by Daljit Nagra
• 'Brendon Gallacher' by Jackie Kay
• 'Give' by Simon Armitage
• 'Les Grands Seigneurs' by Dorothy Molloy
• 'Ozymandias' by Percy Bysshe Shelley
• 'My Last Duchess' by Robert Browning
• 'The River God' by Stevie Smith
• 'The Hunchback in the Park' by Dylan Thomas
• 'The Ruined Maid' by Thomas Hardy
• 'Casehistory: Alison (head injury)' by U. A. Fanthorpe
• 'On a Portrait of a Deaf Man' by John Betjeman
• 'The Blackbird of Glanmore' by Seamus Heaney
• 'A Vision' by Simon Armitage
• 'The Moment' by Margaret Atwood
• 'Cold Knap Lake' by Gillian Clarke
• 'Price We Pay for the Sun' by Grace Nichols
• 'Neighbours' by Gillian Clarke
• 'Crossing the Loch' by Kathleen Jamie
• 'Hard Water' by Jean Sprackland
• 'London' by William Blake
• 'The Prelude' extract by William Wordsworth
• 'The Wild Swans at Coole' by W. B. Yeats
• 'Spellbound' by Emily Brontë
• 'Below the Green Corrie' by Norman MacCaig
• 'Storm in the Black Forest' by D. H. Lawrence
• 'Wind' by Ted Hughes
• 'Flag' by John Agard
• 'Out of the Blue' extract by Simon Armitage
• 'Mametz Wood' by Owen Sheers
• 'The Yellow Palm' by Robert Minhinnick
• 'The Right Word' by Imtiaz Dharker
• 'At the Border' by Choman Hardi
• 'Belfast Confetti' by Ciaran Carson
• 'Poppies' by Jane Weir
• 'Futility' by Wilfred Owen
• 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' by Alfred Tennyson
• 'Bayonet Charge' by Ted Hughes
• 'The Falling Leaves' by Margaret Postgate Cole
• 'Come On, Come Back' by Stevie Smith
• 'next to of course god america i' by E. E. Cummings
• 'Hawk Roosting' by Ted Hughes
• 'The Manhunt' by Simon Armitage
• 'Hour' by Carol Ann Duffy
• 'In Paris With You' by James Fenton
• 'Quickdraw' by Carol Ann Duffy
• 'Ghazal' by Mimi Khalvati
• 'Brothers' by Andrew Forster
• 'Praise Song for My Mother' by Grace Nichols
• 'Harmonium' by Simon Armitage
• Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare
• Sonnet 43 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• 'To His Coy Mistress' by Andrew Marvell
• 'The Farmer's Bride' by Charlotte Mew
• 'Sister Maude' by Christina Rossetti
• 'Nettles' by Vernon Scannell
• 'Born Yesterday' by Philip Larkin

Modern Prose[edit]

• 'My Polish Teacher's Tie' by Helen Dunmore
• 'When the Wasps Drowned' by Clare Wigfall
• 'Compass and Torch' by Elizabeth Baines
• 'On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning' by Haruki Murakami
• 'The Darkness Out There' by Penelope Lively
• 'Anil' by Ridjal Noor
• 'Something Old, Something New' by Leila Aboulela

References[edit]

1. ^'Teachit.co.uk'. Archived from the original on 2011-08-20. Retrieved 2009-08-20.
2. ^Cunningham, Andrew (2005-12-17). 'No prayers nor bells for the finest'. ISSN0307-1235. Retrieved 2019-12-22.
3. ^The Guardian (4 September 2008). 'Top exam board asks schools to destroy book containing knife poem'. Retrieved 15 July 2018.
4. ^Curtis, Polly; editor, education (2008-09-03). 'Top exam board asks schools to destroy book containing knife poem'. The Guardian. ISSN0261-3077. Retrieved 2019-12-22.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
5. ^AQA, https://anthology.aqa.org.uk/Archived 2017-06-03 at the Wayback Machine

External links[edit]