Show how Blake creates opposing attitudes and ideas in his songs of

Ranked 38th in a BBC poll of the hundred greatest Britons, with only British poet

“The Chimney Sweeper” (128): This version of the Chimney Sweeper is very upfront and saddening. The version that is presented in the songs of innocence is much more of a calm town and is not as straightforward, while this version is very short and to the point. In this version its very deep as the narrator basically just calls out the parents/church for doing these horrible things to the children. I really love all three stanzas of this poem because they all have a really deep meaning and Blake transitions through them very well. Reading this poem over and over I don’t know what to make of it other than it is an absolute horrible situation. I think it can be tied in to

Before watching your presentation, I only knew the basics regarding William Blake. There are various interesting things that you mentioned that I did not know about. For example, you mentioned how he was more commonly known for his art rather than his poems. His art as a whole is really interesting. You mentioned how he took his encounters with the people around him, his brother’s death, and visions and reflected them into his work. One thing from that list that stood out to me the most were his visions. He was able to take his visions and portray them in his paintings even when many people found it difficult to understand the meanings behind it.

The Songs of Innocence poems first appeared in Blake’s 1784 novel, An Island in the Moon. In 1788, Blake began to compile in earnest, the collection of Songs of Innocence. And by 1789, this original volume of plates was complete. These poems are the products of the human mind in a state of innocence, imagination, and joy; natural euphoric feelings uninhibited or tainted by the outside world. Following the completion of the Songs of Innocence plates, Blake wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and it is through this dilemma of good and evil and the suffering that he witnesses on the streets of London, that he begins composing Songs of Experience. This second volume serves as a response to Songs of

On January 1st, 2017, a gang held an alleyway waiting for people to come through so they and take their money. The alley was very dark. People came through the alley at nights and trashed the alley, cracking windows, leaving cigarettes on the dirty spray-painted ground littered with sharp shards of glass from a broken window. Their leader, Kole Blazer, was there in the rooftops, waiting for someone to come through, when he saw someone betray his gang: Mike Blazer, his brother. Kole was taller than him by only a few inches. He had brown hair, freckles, blue eyes, more muscular than his brother who was always the weaker one, but they were twins and he wanted to keep a secret. His brother betrayed them and now it’s time for payback.

Blake wanted to show that there are two sides to every situation by writing companion pieces for most of his works. “The Chimney Sweeper”, for example, has the same title in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, as well as “Holy Thursday” that appears in both. “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” are also paired poems contrasting the concept of good and evil that Blake focused on through out his poems.

William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” in his Songs of Innocence is a literary masterpiece that is still relevant and impactful in the modern world. In lovely form and description, Blake explains the atrocities and hardships of the Industrial Age in a poem suitable for school-age children and with the beautiful simplicity that only a writer like Blake could produce. The Songs of Innocence is a look into the purity and wonderful outlook on life that children usually have. While in its counterpart, the Songs of Experience, Blake uses adults as protagonist. The Songs of Experience is a look at the effects that hardships and failures have on adults, therefore having a pessimistic outlook toward life. In his these two works, Blake produces a parallel universe between childhood and adulthood where the optimism of dreams of childhood and the bitterness and stagnation of adulthood never seem to know one another.

William Blake’s poetry contains many themes of religion. Examining Blake’s works, The Chimney Sweeper and The Little Black Boy shows an example of this. In The Chimney Sweeper Tom dreams an angel comes to him and tells him “If he’d be a good boy, he’d have God for his father & never want joy” (122). Upon waking the next day, despite the cold temperatures, Tom feels warm even though he had to work hard in a potentially deadly job that he was forced into. Could this be because he had a great dream? An angel came to him and essentially told him he would be okay and as long as he works hard, God will love him. Could this be a coping mechanism for Tom? He suffers while being exploited but maybe the way he deals with this is by feeling that he won’t

William Blake was a forerunner in the world of poetry in the 18th century that produced works that are being studied to this day. Along with many other greats; poets, artists, and musicians, Blake did not receive the recognition deserved to him until after his death. Many of these poems written by Blake are ordinarily focused on religion while heavily influenced by his imagination. The impact of his imagination in addition to his focus on religion is evident in his work “The Lamb” as well as The Tyger”. “The Lamb” is a poem about a child who is asking the lamb about his creator, then asks if the lamb is aware of his identity. The child already knows the identity which leads to the end of the poem. This poem comes from an album called Songs

William Blake lived during a time of intense social change; the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. These massive changes in society provided Blake with one of the most dramatic outlooks in the transformation of the Western world, the change from a feudal and agricultural society to one in which philosophers and political thinkers, such as Locke, championed the rights of individuals. In accordance with political changes, there were religious changes as well. Religion was another aspect of society that Blake opposed because of its organized practice. The practices of organized religion conflicted with Blake's view and adherence. Organized religion and the shadows it casts upon the natural world

William Blake was a poet, painter, and engraver, who was born in Soho, London on November 28th 1757. Blake lived in London at a time of great political and social change. The Industrial Revolution took place in 1760, the American Revolution began in 1775, and the French Revolution began in 1789, and all of these revolutions greatly influenced William Blake’s writing. Blake wrote his world famous Songs of Innocence in 1789 and later combined it with additional poems titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1794. In this collection of romantic poems Blake conveyed that he is writing about innocence and happiness, but on the contrary they convey quite the opposite. Blake’s poems represent a state of the human soul and incorporate evil, suffering of human beings, injustice and a fallen world altogether. These poems represent the disease, poverty, prostitution, war, social repression, sexual repression, institutional repression that befell London at the time of his writing. Many of Blake’s poems portray the Industrial Revolution in a negative light because of all the harm it brought. These revolutions changed the way people viewed their relationships with the church, as well as the state, and William Blake was heavily affected by the greed and cruelty toward the common worker during the Industrial Revolution. His poems in Songs of Innocence were written in a child’s point of view whereas the poems in Songs of Experience were written in an adult’s point of view that was

William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are collections of poems that utilize the imagery, instruction, and lives of children to make a larger social commentary. The use of child-centered themes in the two books allowed Blake to make a crucial commentary on his political and moral surroundings with deceptively simplistic and readable poetry. Utilizing these themes Blake criticized the church, attacking the hypocritical clergy and pointing out the ironies and cruelties found within the doctrines of organized religion. He wrote about the horrific working conditions of children as a means to magnify the inequality between the poor working class and

William Blake is one of England’s most famous literary figures. He is remembered and admired for his skill as a painter, engraver, and poet. He was born on Nov. 28, 1757 to a poor Hosier’s family living in or around London. Being of a poor family, Blake received little in the way of comfort or education while growing up. Amazingly, he did not attend school for very long and dropped out shortly after learning to read and write so that he could work in his father’s shop. The life of a hosier however was not the right path for Blake as he exhibited early on a skill for reading and drawing. Blake’s skill for reading can be seen in his understanding for and use of works such as the Bible and Greek classic literature.

William Blake was one of those 19th century figures who could have and should have been beatniks, along with Rimbaud, Verlaine, Manet, Cezanne and Whitman. He began his career as an engraver and artist, and was an apprentice to the highly original Romantic painter Henry Fuseli. In his own time he was valued as an artist, and created a set of watercolor illustrations for the Book of Job that were so wildly but subtly colored they would have looked perfectly at home in next month's issue of Wired.

William Blake was a writer and a painter in the late 1700s and early 1800s whose imagination was untamed and incomprehensible to most ordinary people of his time. Blake was different from most writers of his who were trying to be famous and get people?s attention. Everything Blake did was for himself and he was not willing to change for money or popularity. William Blake is often considered to be insanely genius because of his transition to a new literary era, known as Romanticism, and for his depictions of life from the viewpoints of a child and an adult.