"The Inventions of William Blake, Paint and Poet", stated before discussing the poem: "let us continue to look over his notes, bright both with poetry and forms divine, which demonstrate an intimate knowledge of the passions and feelings of the human breast". After quoting the poem in full, the writer claimed, "If Blake had lived in Germany, by this time he would have had commentators of the highest order upon every one of his effusions; but here, so little attention is paid to works of the mind". Ralph Vaughan Williams set the poem to music in his 1958 song cycle Ten Blake Songs. The poem was set to music in 1965 by Benjamin Britten as part of his song cycle Songs and Proverbs of William Blake. Andrew Stauffer, in 2009, claimed that the poem is "Blake's best-known depiction of personal anger's destructive effects". Notes References Bentley, G. E. (editor) William Blake: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1975. Bentley, G. E. Jr. The Stranger From Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988. Davis, Michael. William Blake: A New Kind of Man. University of California Press, 1977. Gilchrist, Alexander. The Life of William Blake. London: John Lane Company, 1907. Glen, Heather. Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Peterfreund, Stuart. William Blake in a Newtonian World. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. Vol. 2. London: Routledge, 2002. Stauffer, Andrew. Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Thompson, Edward. Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. External links A comparison of extant versions of hand painted copies of "A Poison Tree" at the William Blake Archive A Poison Tree plate from Facsimile of what is Believed to be the Last Replica of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1893) Audio recording of "A Poison Tree" Songs of Innocence and of Experience 1794 poems .