First published in 1927 by Frank Cass and Company Limited, London, the book is about William Blake, his symbols, and their meanings. Blake was an English engraver, artist, poet, visionary, and author of exquisite lyrics in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794). The book tries to indicate certain ways of approaching to the poetry of William Blake, in the hope that those who have some appreciation of that poetry, but only limited opportunities for close study of it, may be encouraged to follow their inclination still further.
The values for which Plowman lived and died he set down, a credo if ever there was one, in this book. For although it is a book about Blake and his symbols and their meanings, it is something more; it goes beyond Blake and becomes universal and timeless, as Blake’s own work did. So, it is a book about religion, which Blake said was brotherhood; wherefore it is already far removed from the religion of the religious institutions as we know them, and the nearer to that of God, “the Divine Humanity”, the incarnation of the “Poetic Vision”. A book which imaginatively interprets another man’s writings, and so is not critical in the merely anatomical sense, is inevitably an account not only of the soul of the man whose writings it illumines, as this book is an account of Blake’s soul; it is also an account of the soul of him who interprets, as this book is account of Max Plowman’s.
Max Plowman (1st September 1883, London—3rd June 1941, Langham, United Kingdom), was an English poet, writer, and pacifist. He was the son of a businessman who dealt in the production of bricks. He left school at the age of 16 and joined his father’s business where he worked for a decade. He enlisted into the British Army in 1914 and served in the front-line trenches of the Somme before being invalided back home. In the same year, he moved on to journalism and writing poetry, and was married to Dorothy Lloyd Sulman. During the 1930s he got involved in writing for socialist publication such as The Adelphi, Peace News, and The New Age. He associated with other writers of similar political views such as George Orwell and, in 1934, he was one of the co-founders of a commune based in Langham, Essex, called the Adelphi Centre. His published works include A Lap Full of Seed, The Right to Live, War and the Creative Impulse, A Subaltern on the Somme, The Faith Called Pacifism, and Bridge into the Future.
