Poems: Introduction by Patti Smith (Vintage Classics)

"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)