William Blake 
For the Sexes: the Gates of Paradise 
(Illuminated Manuscript with the Original Illustrations of William Blake)

This carefully crafted ebook: ‘For the Sexes: the Gates of Paradise (Illuminated Manuscript with the Original Illustrations of William Blake)’ is formatted for your e Reader with a functional and detailed table of contents. The Gates of Paradise, were first published in a limited run in 1793. W.Blake later changed the title to For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, and added several more drawings as well as a preface and concluding verse, publishing this version in 1818. The seventeen emblematic drawings and their commentaries depict the life of man from birth to death: passage through the four elements (water, earth, wind and fire), hatching as a child from the ‘mundane shell, ‘ encountering women, reaching for the moon of love (‘I want, I want’), falling into Time’s Ocean. After several other episodes he finally arrives at the death’s door with Job’s words: ‘I have said to the Worm: Thou art my mother and my sister.’ There a female figure is ‘Weaving to Dreams the Sexual strife, And Weeping over the Web of Life.’ William Blake (1757 – 1827) was a British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. Blake proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th-century. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.