This study includes a facsimile of Edwin John Ellis and William Butler Yeats's text of William Blake's unfinished epic Vala, reproduced from their 1893 edition of The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic and Critical (Quaritch). Ellis and Yeats were the first editors and commentators of Vala, and this study provides textual apparatus which show the immense difficulties they encountered and the numerous changes they made as the attempted to derive a readable text from a "heap of unsorted and unnumbered" manuscript leaves. / Ellis and Yeats began their collaboration in 1889; they shared in the copying of the manuscript and, probably, in the arrangement of passages. Ellis frequently emended Blake's verse in an effort to improve the meter (as this study's lengthy "Table of Variants" demonstrates), and he was largely responsible for the arrangement of the manuscript leaves; Nights I, VII, and VII gave the greatest difficulty here. / In Night I they arranged pages 5 and 6 in reverse order, omitted pages 15 and 16 altogether, and incorrectly arranged the Night's last two leaves. Except for their inability to place manuscript pages 111 and 112 (whose present position at the end of Night VIII is still not totally satisfactory), the only other anomaly in their arrangement is their combining of the two Night Sevens; they print what is now known as VIIa ahead of VIIb, maintaining, however, that VIIb was Blake's "first draught" for the Night. / Even though Ellis and Yeats believed Vala was Blake's most important poem, they did not use it to its best advantage in their mammoth commentary, "The Symbolic System." Their preoccupation with mysticism and the occult and their eccentric interpretation of Vala seriously hindered their efforts to elucidate Blake's major prophecies. Their commentary, however, did contain some grains of truth and was instrumental in convincing other editors and critics that Blake deserved further investigation. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-06, Section: A, page: 2691. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74534 |
| Contributors | STARLING, ROY., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 461 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
Page generated in 0.0026 seconds