William Blake's first appearance in print was a small collection of juvenile verses and a fragment of a play, King Edward the Third, which was privately printed in 1783 by a group of friends led by John Flaxman and A. S. Matthews. Most of the verses had been written before Blake was twenty. Much of the material is derivative, showing the influence of Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and other earlier poets. Blake, rather embarrassed by his juvenilia, never published the text or individual poems, distributing a few copies of Poetical Sketches to close friends and keeping the remainder himself. Today, only twenty-two copies of the reportedly fifty copies of Blake's first book are known to have survived.

Shown here is the Ballantyne Press reprinting of Poetical Sketches (1899), with woodcut decorations by Charles Ricketts.