A Visit to William Blake's Inn
by Nancy Willard
Summary
Nancy Willard imagines an inn kept by the poet William Blake himself, where a child stays for a day and a half among an unruly cast of guests: a talking Rabbit, a Rat, the Wise Cow, a Tiger, and the Man in the Marmalade Hat. The book collects sixteen poems, an epilogue among them, tracking that short visit from arrival through breakfast orders barked out by the King of Cats to a nighttime ride in Blake's own wonderful car and a walk along the Milky Way. A prose introduction frames the whole project as personal rather than academic: Willard recalls being given a copy of Blake's own Songs of Innocence and of Experience as a sick child, inscribed with the line poetry is the best medicine, and the inn she builds afterward reads like a grown up's answer to that gift.
Each poem rhymes and scans with real discipline, but the mood stays light and a little silly rather than reverent, cats ordering breakfast and cows dreaming in verse rather than anything solemn. It is a book to read a poem or two at a sitting, aloud more often than silently, and it rewards a young listener with jokes at the same time it rewards an adult reader who catches the wink toward Blake's own visionary poems. Alice and Martin Provensen's gouache paintings, built from the same half timbered, lantern lit vision of Blake's England, carry as much of the book's charm as the verse itself, and a reader drawn only to plotted stories should know upfront that this is a collection to page through rather than a narrative to follow toward an ending.
Historical Context & Significance
A Visit to William Blake's Inn won the 1982 Newbery Medal, the first year the medal's winner and a Caldecott Honor book were the same title: Alice and Martin Provensen received a 1982 Caldecott Honor for their illustrations, while that year's Caldecott Medal itself went to Chris Van Allsburg's Jumanji, with the Provensens among the runners up. The 1982 Newbery Honor books were Beverly Cleary's Ramona Quimby, Age 8 and Aranka Siegal's Upon the Head of the Goat. Harcourt Brace published the book in 1981.
Kirkus Reviews judged the Provensens' pictures poles apart from the visionary intensity of Blake's own art, a mixed note inside an otherwise admiring review, while critic Zena Sutherland praised the poems themselves as playful or even humorous, and just as often thoughtful, with fresh, felicitous phrasing. The book's oddest afterlife arrived decades later: after 2001, the poem Two Sunflowers Move into the Yellow Room began circulating online misattributed to Blake himself, and some schools taught it as his authentic work until a librarian, Thomas Pitchford, traced its actual authorship back to Willard.