This comprehensive selection includes complete texts of all Blake's best known work: The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Thel, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America, The Book of Urizen, and Laocoon.

All Blake's significant lyric poems are included, and there are generous selections from The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem and The Everlasting Gospel. Each work (including the individual Songs) has an introduction describing a range of critical opinion. The annotation - the most detailed of any single-volume Blake - glosses difficult terms, provides information on Blake's intellectual and poetic sources and his historical contexts, describes significant differences between the unique individual copies of each illuminated book, and discusses all aspects of contemporary Blake scholarship. Modernization addresses the difficulties of Blake's text for first-time readers.

The visual aspects of Blake's composite verbal-visual art is fully acknowledged: every design from the illuminated books selected is described in detail. The book also contains overall introductions to discuss critical approaches to Blake's poetry, interpreting his designs, and the issue of modernizing his text.