"WITHOUT UNCEASING PRACTISE NOTHING CAN BE DONE PRACTISE IS ART IF YOU LEAVE OFF YOU ARE LOST"

(BLAKE, William) KEYNES, Geoffrey. William Blake's Laocoön. A Last Testament. With Related Works: On Homer's Poetry and On Virgil, The Ghost of Abel. London: Trianon Press, 1976. Quarto, original half brown morocco. $700.

Limited first edition, number 234 of 380 copies (from a total edition of 438), with 11 plates.

"Around the year 1790 Blake had made in his book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a comparatively plain statement of his conception of the artist and the imaginative arts in relation to the materialistic world, limited by the five senses of rational unimaginative man… Toward the end of his life, probably in the year 1820, Blake decided to make another, even clearer, statement of his position, which he conveyed in the three works know as Laocoön, On Homer's Poetry and On Virgil, and The The Ghost of Abel. These are closely related to one another, though Laocoön took the form of a conventionally engraved plate, while the two others were relief etchings made in the same way as those for the Illuminated Books, though they were not coloured. The community of these three works has not usually been fully apprehended and they are here gathered together to form a logical group, with a commentary and formal descriptions of the plates and of various related works."

Fine condition.