Blake was undoubtedly a fierce critic of many aspects of 18th century society, and through his poetry, called on people to free themselves from the 'mind-forged manacles' which religious dominance and social conventions had placed upon them. His...

William Wordsworth and William Blake were both distraught by the plight of man in the early nineteenth century. Their separate but somewhat unified visions of man's problems are displayed in their poems "Lines Written in Early Spring," (lines...

William Blake's collection of illuminated poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience depict, as the title page explains, "the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul" (Blake 1). Although Songs of Innocence, written in 1789, was crafted five years...

William Blake and John Keats were both prolific English poets of the Romantic era. Blake, an early Romantic along with Wordsworth and Coleridge, produced a poem called "Night" in 1789, which is part of a series of illustrated poetry called "Songs...

William Blake’s Abolitionism

“I know my Execution is not like Any Body Else I do not intend it should be so.”

William Blake is arguably one of the most eccentric and enigmatic artists of the Romantic era. His ideas about religion, art and society...

“The Human Abstract” offers an alternative analysis of the virtues of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love that constituted God and Man in “The Divine Image”, and can be thus considered a companion poem. The speaker argues that Pity could not exist...

William Blake presents two contrasting views of life in his Songs of Innocence and Experience: the innocent and idyllic world of childhood is set against the dark and ominous world of adulthood. Several of the poems in this collection can be read...

The poem “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake is set around a dark background of child labor. In the 18th and 19th centuries, boys of four and five were sold because of their small physical size to work as chimneysweepers. In this poem, one of...

William Blake’s “Little Black Boy,” Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” James Joyce’s “The Dead” and Sarah Kane’s Blasted each demonstrate how a writer’s use of language can give us intimate access to the time period that in turn informs the...

William Blake’s collection of poems, Songs of Innocence, highlights both the positive and negative aspects of the trait of innocence. Many of the poems within the collection feature speakers who find comfort in religious teachings and experiences...

William Blake was known for tailoring his romantic poetry specifically for children, particularly in ‘Songs of Innocence’, where the themes of nature and religion were utilised to allow Blake to directly educate his intended younger audience about...

William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience exemplifies his ideas on the nature of creation. They demonstrate the innocent and bucolic world of childhood, versus an adult world of depravity and repression.

Blake stands outside innocence...

William Blake, as a libertarian and political writer concerned with Romantic values concerning the freedom of the human spirit and liberty, wrote his ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ in an attempt to attack the corrupt political systems and...

In his iconic poem The Tyger, William Blake directly addresses the paradoxically beautiful yet horrific figure with a question: What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? This simple question, wondering how and what divine being...

. William Blake, in line with his standing as a Romantic and being both politically and ideologically a libertarian, can be seen in his ‘Songs of Innocence’ to express his views as to the superlative value of the freedom of the human spirit, by...

Writing on nineteenth-century London poetry, William Sharpe comments that ‘Regardless of shared reference to sublimity, fog, of Babylonian blindness, each poet’s London is different. Each time we read ‘London’ we have to begin again.’ For poets in...

“The Poison Tree” from William Blake’s Songs of Experience is a poem that tells the story of one who is engulfed by the hatred felt towards a foe. This individual begins with telling the fury they experienced toward a friend who is told told of...

Despite Blake’s asserted protest in his dual collection, ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’, the role of protest in his vision of innocence, itself, is more debatable. Arguably, Blake’s protest is constructed only through the contrasts that arise...

Blake’s protest against oppression of the human spirit is a clear and assertive one, yet his methods to establish it are subtly employed. The collection of poems establishes, as Blake intended, two “contrary visions” of freedom and oppression....

In ‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’, Blake evokes contrasting visions of the world. The two poems, 'The Echoing Green' and 'London', are especially characteristic of these contrary visions; evoking polar opposite images of innocence,...

William Blake’s attitude about the poor in his poetry suggests that he is angry at his country, Britain, for allowing so many of its citizens, especially children, to be poor when it’s supposed to be a wealthy global superpower. This is shown...

William Blake, a 19th century romantic poet, wrote poetic arguments in Songs of Innocence and Experience filled with rich imagery and symbolism to convey his, at the time, idiosyncratic views surrounding the church and its negative impact on...

William Blake’s poems ‘The Tyger’ and ‘Holy Thursday’ - each from his more dysphemistic book ‘Songs of Experience’ - explore and lament the loss of spirituality in the unethical era of the Industrial Revolution. He approaches the topics of man's...

Poets of the Romantic movement sought to counteract the prevailing political and social viewpoints of the 18th-19th century. Romanticism was a philosophical movement and reaction against the logical enlightenment known as an age of reason which...