Proposal

My goal is to make an edition of the poem “The Clod and the Pebble” from the collection Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake. This text is most accessible, like the majority of poetry these days, on the internet, where it exists with multiple variations. These unsourced copies from unknown editions vary from one another with respect to the capitalisation of words, the indentation of stanzas, the use of apostrophes for marking possession, the punctuation at the end of lines and the use of quotation marks to indicate who is speaking what. The last point is especially important, since it leaves the question of whether Blake is only quoting the Clod’s perspective and the Pebble’s perspective as a conversation between an innocent and an experienced being, or whether he is quoting their words as an eternal truth, reflecting the human condition, even outside the context of their interaction. It is somewhat similar to what we saw with “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats with the line “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. One other interesting thing to me is that the other points of divergence between the editions like the changes to capitalisation and punctuation don’t appear to be copying mistakes, but rather deliberate choices on the part of scholars.

For my edition, I want to try to get to the author’s original intent, trying to either use the manuscript copy of the poem (if it still exists and I can find an accessible copy) or a modern, scholarly edition of Blake as a copy-text (So that I can avoid redoing the work of finding the earliest printed edition and tracing the family tree of present-day editions, although I will have to find the editions the various internet poetry websites are citing and how they fit into the family tree). I want to write for an audience that isn’t familiar with Bibliography and would thus need to be brought up to speed on everything, but while maintaining transparency of communicating my decisions in creating the edition to them. I want the poem to still stand at the centre of the text, so my plan is to use the affordances of WordPress to make a dynamic edition, where the poem is just a plain text with the sources of variation underlined, and you can click on them to make a drop-down discussing what the variation is exactly.