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'Those who control their passions do so because their passions are weak enough to be controlled' William Blake

Patti Smith introduces her favourite selection of Blake's poems, including the complete poems from Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

William Blake is one of Britain's most fascinating writers, who, as well as being a groundbreaking poet, is also well known as a painter, engraver, radical and mystic. Although Blake was dismissed as an eccentric by his contemporaries, his powerful and richly symbolic poetry has been a fertile source of inspiration to the many writers and artists who have followed in his footsteps. A visionary genius... There are passages of brilliance everywhere... The wonder of Blake is that he had an imagination that brought together words and images * Independent * There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron -- William Wordsworth The movement of his [Blake's] early verse are like the gambollings of some very powerful animal, still in its fluffy-footed and tottering babyhood -- Samuel Butler Yeats [Blake] always insists on the importance of the pure, clean line that evokes and creates the figure on the background of the uncreated void -- James Joyce Blake is a great liberating imaginative force -- Tom Paulin

Poems: Introduction by Patti Smith