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Eeckhout's work also adumbrates 'the limits of reading and writing' criticism itself. Criticism's limits may also be fixed by the epistemological problem inherent in it. This is most clearly revealed in the chapter called 'Between Mimesis and Music', which begins with J. Hillis Miller's tripartite division of (Greek) theories of representation into mimesis (akin to Abrams's mirror), unveiling or alethia (Abrams's lamp), and creation. Eeckhout assimilates creation with the 'self-sufficient potentials of language', or the 'excess' of language embodied in 'the structuring force and irreducible materiality of Stevens's rhetoric' where it 'surfaces and manages to make itself heard'. It is indeed this supra-representational face of verbal art that it is difficult for criticism to deal with because it requires description, rather than interpretation, and exposition, rather than the translation of x into y. Eeckhout therefore prudently weaves his account of non-referential excess around and through his dialogue with other critical views of specific poems. The result is a balanced view of the relative place of something like thought and attitude, on the one hand, and aesthetic embodiment per se, on the other, in Stevens's work. Eeckhout's readings of individual poems, then, should, like his introductory chapters, be enjoyable and profitable not only to habitual readers of Stevens but to other readers of poetry as well. Beverly Maeder University of Lausanne

Songs of Innocence and of Experience. By William Blake. Commentary by Stuart Curran. [London 1794 & 1826]. Oakland, California: Octavo CD-Rom, 2003. $30.00. 1 891788 89 2

The market-place for facsimiles of Blake's Songs has become increasingly crowded, most recently with Andrew Lincoln's Tate edition, and the online facilities made available with the Blake Archive. The latter has to some extent moved the technology on from the CD format, allowing simultaneous access to a wider variety of copy-texts and impressive adaptation of digital resources (though this at times can itself prompt a cry of 'Enough! or Too much' {Marriage pi. 10). However the Octavo facsimile provides an excellent addition in terms of a convenient and practical teaching format: I would predict that the plate-by-plate comparison feature that takes up the final quarter or so of the CD-Rom will be far and away the most widely used aspect. The single-sequence plates (of copy C and copy Z) are impres-

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sively high resolution; Curran's commentary is solid if not ground-breaking; and the transcriptions of the poems helpful if inevitably contentious where moving away from the standard Erdman text. A brief review cannot hope to add much to the copious exegesis that the Songs have attracted, but a few points may be raised. It is claimed that 'no other work by William Blake presents the complexity of his artistic vision as clearly as Songs of Innocence and of Experience'. Clarity might not necessarily co-exist with complexity (both terms later modulate into 'best known'); these are comparatively early and accessible works, hence their wide dissemination, but hardly Blake's most representative or profound. The canonical orthodoxy is to that extent commercially-driven on the basis of pedagogic convenience and guaranteed sales. The Songs are identified with 'the contrasting and complementary natures of youth and maturity'. Against this one might cite Northrop Frye: when Blake engraved the Songs of Experience 'he was no longer a child of thirty-two but a grown man of thirty-seven'. In broad historical terms, Innocence may be construed as the most impressive British manifestation of a new post-Rousseauesque concept of childhood, but it is at least as much based on the very adult theological hermeneutics of Swedenborgian correspondences. 'The Two Contrary States of the Human Soul' are not mutually exclusive and certainly not sequential: the nurse can possess as much or as little innocence as her charges; the chimney sweep displays as much or as little experience as his absent 'father & mother'. Pairing 'one of the earliest and latest editions of this masterwork' goes against the central methodological postulates of recent editorial practice in Blake criticism, whereby anything less than immersion in the material particulars of the individual copy (at times enlarged to specifiable printing session) is potentially misleading. Reproduction though necessarily imperfect, must aim for encyclopaedic completion: 'less than All cannot satisfy Man'. Hence the most attractive feature of the Octavo CD-Rom becomes one of the most questionable. The format of reproduction allows convenient juxtaposition of an early and a late Blake, thereby necessarily implying a developmental model of greater subtlety and discrimination in the later designs. Copy Z probably deserves the title 'masterwork' for its lavish high-quality finish. On plate-by-plate comparison it would almost without exception take precedence over the dexterous but relatively light washes of the earlier copy C (themselves possibly the work of Catherine Blake). The consequent misleading inference of a greater sophistication of later technique also arises with Lincoln's decision to use copy X for the Tate

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edition. However if one wants to preserve some fidelity to the original context of enunciation, it is the rougher finish (and accordingly cheaper pricing of 5 shillings rather than 5 guineas) that defines the parameters of contemporary response. (One may also note a preference in critics such as Robert Essick for black-and-white designs over coloured printings for foregrounding the nuances of the engraving process). The Octavo format presents both copies as books, with the physical features of binding, dedicatory pages, and so on, reproduced as faithfully as the designs themselves (in line with recent reception theory on the book as material commodity defining its own modes of interpretation). This is certainly not how the 1794 copy would have been distributed: it would be unlikely that there would be a cover for example as this was left to the discretion of the individual purchaser. Both copies have been equally transformed as collectors's items whereas the 1794 version represents a more immanent and ephemeral form of cultural intervention. There is arguably something stultifying about this very reverence for the artefact: insofar as it is the concept of Blake as radical that has tended to underpin the canonisation of the Songs, the central justification for the quality of reproduction becomes in some ways inimical to the very text that it seeks to enshrine. In many ways it would be preferable to consider the early and late versions of the Songs as entirely separate texts. Copy C belongs to the revolutionary debate of the early 1790s, setting an idealised pastoral community founded on sentimentalist psychology against the existing constraints of 'mind-forg'd manacles' ('London'): it is concerned with possible futures for a nation undergoing a turbulent process of self-redefinition and confronting the prospect of imminent and prolonged warfare. Copy Z might better be regarded as a proto-Victorian text, emphatically post-Waterloo, appealing to a burgeoning connoisseur art-market founded on mercantile wealth and imperial dominance. One might surmise, with the generic formats of eighteenth-century children's book, hymns, and street-ballads rapidly receding from contemporary memory, that its appeal to a Regency collector would be primarily of a period charm evoking a now bygone era (broadly how Blake was celebrated by the circle of Samuel Palmer and the Ancients). The date altering alters all. Steve Clark Nara Women's University