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Poetical Sketches is the first collection of poetry and prose by William Blake, written between 1769 and 1777. Forty copies were printed in 1783 with the help of Blake's friends, the artist John Flaxman and the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew, at the request of his wife Harriet Mathew. The book was never published for the public, with copies instead given as gifts to friends of the author and other interested parties. Of the forty copies, fourteen were accounted for at the time of Geoffrey Keynes' census in 1921.[1] A further eight copies had been discovered by the time of Keynes' The Complete Writings of William Blake in 1957.[2] In March 2011, a previously unrecorded copy was sold at auction in London for £72,000.
