In Review

Poet and artist William Blake created some of the most indelible work of the Romantic era. But for more than two centuries, his works posed a technical challenge. Literary critics claimed Blake’s writing, and art historians, his illustrations—with neither camp able to do justice to the full body of his work.

Two decades ago, the William Blake Archive—sponsored by the University with the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—set out to take advantage of the possibilities of digital media. For the first time, the archive fully brought together Blake’s writings and illustrations, as he had originally produced them. The archive—coedited by Morris Eaves, a professor of English and the Richard L. Turner Professor of Humanities at Rochester—now holds almost 7,000 images from 45 of the world’s research libraries and museums, and a transformative redesign, launched in December, makes the site more accessible than ever before. The redesigned archive was recently nominated for an international Digital Humanities Award, in the category of Best Digital Humanities Tool. It complements the leading academic journal for Blake studies, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, which is also coedited by Eaves and marks the 50th anniversary of its founding this year.

But you don’t need to consult the archive or the journal to feel Blake’s influence, which pervades popular culture through music, literature, film, and television.

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Visit the William Blake Archive at Blakearchive.org.