The William Blake Archive

As a poet and printmaker, William Blake created small books of handwritten verses and etchings he embellished with watercolors. But his illustrations are nearly impossible to reproduce in printed anthologies -- leading scholars to focus on Blake's words instead of his images.

Three Blake editors have now seized on the graphic capabilities of the World-Wide Web to change that. Based on work by technical experts at the University of Virginia, they are developing an electronic archive that will allow scholars to search a "visual concordance" of Blake's work, zoom in on his tiny drawings, easily compare the same pages from different editions, and more.

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