William Blake

Selected Poems

By: William Blake

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 1 hr and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

At the end of his life, William Blake (1757-1827) gave up hope of being widely understood, but the twentieth century brought to his work a new and intense interest and acclaim.

Included in this collection are well-known poems such as "Tyger! Tyger! Burning Bright" and "A Poison Tree"; longer poems such as "The Everlasting Gospel", "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"; Blake's principal prose work; and an assortment of epigrams and short satire.

Poet, artist, and mystic, Blake wrote, "I must Create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's." Create he did.

(P)1992 Blackstone Audiobooks

Classic Literature in an Easy to Digest Form

I greatly enjoyed the passages straight from letters from Blake to colleagues. Narrator is clear and concise. Easy to follow and entertaining to listen to.

The egotistical sublime!

Welcome to the NHK! Everyone's in a tizzy about what such and such contemporary poet said, or is worried (wearied?) that so 🤔 and so is "controversial" because of his or her "personal life".

I wonder how mad they would get if they listened to poets who lived 200 years ago!!!

what a gift to listen to Blake

his tiger burns bright as it leaps from the page to the voice. who knew Blake could be sparky as well as ethereal. what a kick I got out of hearing him lambast Swinbourn

Even better listened to than read.

Earth’s Heavens and Hells addressed, explored, and celebrated in his clever verses. Very enjoyable listen. Four Stars ****

A pivotal book

A wonderful book that I found to be developmental and maturative for a young man coming of age such as myself. I found this book to be worthwhile and generally intelligent and I found incredible relation with the author. I further highly recommend this book.

Good selection

I’ve read various works of Blake and this seems to me to be a good recap of his poems at various stages.

I was hoping his poetry would equal his painting.

He is better with the brush. Some of it was hard to get through. Maybe its just me though.

technical folks are lazy?

is it truly hard to break up each poem into its own chapter with a title (when the poem has a title). just seems like laziness; like someone just can't be bothered because they truly don't care.

Poorly recorded Overperformed Narration

A great collection poorly put together.
There’s an audible background chatter going on throughout the recording, kinda distracting and surprised this recording was still offered with such poor quality, but meh it’s free so i suppose you can’t expect it to be well done.
About the narrator, it’s too overdone and it’s more performed rather than narrated and as some reviewers already pointed out it can be hard to listen to.
I wish Audible wasn’t so lazy about providing proper table of contents for audiobooks, they almost never have chapter titles,or even correctly numbered chapters, but this one is even worse in that all the works are recorded into two chapters, you can’t easily find or skip to any piece you want to hear, or know how exactly these are divided into two chapters, which is particularly annoying in a collection.

Wonderful Collection

William Blake is one of my favorite poets and this collection contained many of his poems I love. My favorite, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, was thankfully included.

This is a nice collection to feed the soul and engage the mind.