William Blake, Summary PDF

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WILLIAM BLAKE He belongs to the Augustan Age but he’s considered a forerunner for the Romantic Age  he was born in London from an humble family (he also remained poor during all his life) and he became an engraver: he studied at the Royal Academy of Arts. As a painter and engraver he broke with the conventions of perspective and proportions, creating a new kind of which emphasised the power of imagination (this ideal clashed with the Augustan ideal about the absolute power of reason).

Political Freethinker: he supported the French Revolution but he witnessed the evil aspects of the Industrial Revolutions  he started to believe that the artist should gain a new role: the guardian of the spirit and imagination.

Strong Sense of Religion: the Bible = most important influence on his life because it presented a complete vision of the ancient world and its history  Blake’s Christianism is not liturgical or moralistic: he thinks that Christianism is responsible for the fragmentation of consciousness and man’s dualism, based on the “Contemporary Opposites”: individuals are used to move from a starting state to the next one (from childhood to adulthood) and the second state completely replaces the first. Instead Blake thought that contrary states could exist in parallel: the possibility of progress is strictly linked to the tension between these opposite states of mind.

Forerunner of the Romantic Age: his experiences as a craftman and visionary contributed to the development of his poetry  “imagination is more important than reason”, Illuminated Printing: poetry + picture. Through imagination man can understand the world and imagination can lead you to see beyond the material reality  God, the Child and the Poet share this power: poet = prophet who can see deeper into the reality, so he has to try to warn the other men about the evil of society.

Blake’s Interests in Social Problems: he supported the abolition of slavery and the ideals of the French Revolution (revolution = purifying violence but necessary for man’s redemption). He focuses his attentions on the consequences of the Industrial Revolution: in his poem he sympathized for the victims of injustices caused by this “materialistic attitude”.

Style: simple structure + original use of symbols (the Child, the Father, the Artist as incarnations of innocence, experience and higher innocence)  he uses linear and rythmical verses (frequent use of repetitions).

SONGS OF INNOCENCE (1789): poems written before the French Revolution, here we can notice an high enthusiasm for radical ideals  this collection of poems deals about a shepherd who receives inspiration from a child and so decides to composing songs to celebrate the divine: the poems deal with childhood as “the symbol of innocence” linked to the states of happiness and freedom + imagination  symple style and musical language.

SONGS OF EXPERIENCE (1794) : poems written during the “Reign of Terror”  Blake manages to written the counter-part of poems which belong to the first collection: these poems show a more complex vision of the world and a more pessimistic consideration of life.

“Experience” = adulthood which, coexisting in the mind with the “innocence of childhood”, provides a new vision of reality.

“THE LAMB” – COMMENTARY The poem is a child’s song, in the form of a question (first stanza) and answer (second stanza). The first stanza is descriptive, instead the second focuses on spiritual matters and contains the answer to what is asked in the first one. The child’s question is both profound and simple (“who made you?”): the child is asking what all human always wanted to understand, their own origins and the nature of creation. The answer, however, reveals his confidence in Christian faith and his innocent acceptance of its precepts. The lamb of course symbolizes Jesus: the traditional image of Jesus as a lamb underscores the Christian values of gentleness, purity, and peace, however the image of the child is also associated with Jesus infact the Bible’s description of Jesus in his childhood shows him as innocent and pure. These are also the characteristics from which the child-speaker approaches the ideas of nature and of God. This poem, like many of the Songs of Innocence, accepts what Blake saw as the more positive aspects of Christian belief. But it doesn’t provide a completely adequate doctrine, because it fails to account for the presence of suffering and evil in the world. The counter-part poem to this one, found in the Songs of Experience, is “The Tyger”: together, these two poems give a complete perspective of the world and the society, which includes good and bad aspects of reality.

“THE TYGER” – COMMENTARY With this poem Blake build up the idea that nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. The tiger is contemporary a beautiful creature and also horrific in its capacity for violence. The tiger initially appears as an impressively sensuous image: However, when the poem progresses, it becomes a symbolic character, representing the spiritual and moral problem exposed by Blake himself: perfectly beautiful and yet perfectly destructive. Blake’s tiger becomes the symbolic center for an investigation into the presence of evil in the world and expresses (third stanza) a both simple and deep question: why would a good God create a so dangerous creature? In the fourth stanza God is seen as a smithy, symbol of the artist, who decided to create this amazing and frightening creature using hammer and fire (who is for example considered a purifying symbol) and in the fifth stanza Blake asks if God himself smiles when he sees the tiger from the skies. There is also a reference to the lamb which reminds the reader that the tiger and the lamb have been created by the same God, and raises questions about the implications of this suggesting a contrast between the perspectives of “experience” and “innocence” represented here and in the poem “The Lamb.”

In the end “The Tyger” mainly consists of unanswered questions, and the poet leaves us to look at the complexity of creation. The open thoughts of “The Tyger” contrasts with the easy confidence, in “The Lamb,” of a child’s innocent faith in a benevolent universe....