Page 268 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 26: William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience

oppression of Church, State, and the ruling classes. The volume’s “Contrary States” are sometimes Notes
signaled by patently repeated or contrasted titles: in Innocence, Infant Joy, in Experience, Infant
Sorrow; in Innocence, The Lamb, in Experience, The Fly and The Tyger.
Songs of Experience is a poetry collection of 26 poems forming the second part of William Blake’s
Songs of Innocence and Experience. The poems were published in 1794. Some of the poems, such as
The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found were moved by Blake to Songs of Innocence, and were
frequently moved between the two books. In this collection of poems, Blake contrasts Songs of
Innocence, in which he shows how the human spirit blossoms when allowed its own free movement
with Songs of Experience, in which he shows how the human spirit withers after it has been
suppressed and forced to conform to rules, and doctrines. In fact, Blake was an English Dissenter
and actively opposed the doctrines of the Anglican Church, which tells its members to suppress
their feelings.

26.1 Introduction to the Author

William Blake is one of the most renowned poets in the history of English literature. Born to the
owners of a hosiery shop on Broad Street in the center of London in 1757, William Blake developed
into a toddler of extraordinary imagination. While only a young boy (around the age of four), he
spoke to his parents of seeing angels playing amongst him, encountering visions of heaven and hell
throughout London and the nearby countryside, and spotting God keeping a close eye on him during
tasks and chores. It was not long before the young Blake began to stencil out the visions from his
imagination, and as an eleven year old, he enlisted in Pars’ Drawing School to learn the art of printing
and plaster casting.
Soon thereafter, Blake began to apprentice under London artist James Basire, and as a fourteen-
year-old, he was assigned to drawing monuments in Westminster Abbey, which led to a lifelong
admiration for Gothic art and religious illustration. While working with Basire, Blake befriended
contemporary apprentice James Parker. Parker and Blake would later become partners in a jointly
owned print shop on Broad Street, right next door to the Blake hosiery shop and household, a
partnership that only lasted one year (1784-85).

Comment on Blake as a social critic.
One must recall the historical context of Blake’s development from a young artist to a poet in his
mid-twenties. In 1775, America began a revolution of independence from England, igniting tense
controversy in London, and the young artist witnessed an angry society torn apart by liberal
sympathizers with the American revolutionaries and conservative loyalists to the colonial empire.
In 1782, William Blake married Catherine Boucher, and one year later, he published his first book of
poems, Poetical Sketches, at the encouragement of the Reverend Anthony Stephen Matthew and his
wife, owners of a salon which was a frequent drinking spot for the twenty-six year old.
In the mid to late 1780s, two events came into Blake’s life that would change his method of expression
and alter his artistic voice forever, while setting him up as one of the most unique and most referenced
poetic geniuses of the English language. First, he began to read and study the works of Scandinavian
poet Swedenborg, a philosophical rebel who refused and refuted the semi-materialistic philosophy
that had grown so widespread in the late eighteenth century. Second, he began to draw and write
on copper plates before dipping them into a corrosive acid that would allow for his words and
images to stand out from the plate itself, ready to be colored and inked for easier printing. William
Blake, the plating artist with a revolutionary voice, was born.

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