Edwin Ellis

For the musician, see Edwin Ellis (musician).

Edwin John Ellis (1848 – 1916) was a British poet and illustrator, now remembered mostly for the three-volume collection of the works of William Blake he edited with W. B. Yeats.

Ellis was a long-term friend of John Butler Yeats, and met his son William Butler when the Yeats family moved to Bedford Park in London. The study of Blake, with Ellis, proved an intellectual investment for Yeats the son on which he drew in later years.

Ellis took part in the gatherings of the Rhymers' Club, and contributed to their anthologies. Other than that, he was in an association with John Trivett Nettleship, and Sidney Hall, also followers of Blake, as well as John Butler Yeats and George Wilson (1848-1890, a Scottish Pre-Raphaelite inspired artist), called The Brotherhood.

Works

• Facsimile of the original outlines before colouring of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience executed by William Blake 1893
• The works of William Blake, poetic, symbolic and critical 1893 (with W B Yeats)
• The Real Blake; a portrait biography, 1907
• Fate in Arcadia
• Seen in Three Days
• Sancan the Bard