What Are the Salient Features of Blake’s Poetry?

One of William Blake great poems, The Tyger” is well known as one or perhaps

Since Blake loves lambs because of the connection they makes with Christianity and sinners, he uses the description of a lamb to signify what God did for us. He also utilizes imagery in giving the picture feeling of deep faith he has in his Christianity. One of the most sensual lyrics is lyric 6; “Softest clothing, wooly, bright. This gives the reader a sense of what God does for sinners; He gives them all their needs.

times in the poem, by doing so, Blake is able to let the reader take

For example, in “Infant Joy,” Blake demonstrates the child’s eye and sense of wonder that we find in the incorruptibility of infants. Blake presents a truly pure creature in the first stanza:

The Romantic Period centered on creative imagination, nature, mythology, symbolism, feelings and intuition, freedom from laws, impulsiveness, simplistic language, personal experiences, democracy, and liberty, significant in various art forms including poetry. The development of the self and self-awareness became a major theme as the Romantic Period was seen as an unpredictable release of artistic energy, new found confidence, and creative power found in the writings of the Romantic poets Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, who made a substantial impact on the world of poetry. Two of the Romantic poets, William Blake, and Percy Bysshe Shelley rebelled against convention and authority in search of personal, political and artistic freedom. Blake and Shelley attempted to liberate the subjugated people through the contrary state of human existence prevalent throughout their writings, including Blake’s “The Chimney Sweepers,” from “Songs of Innocence”, “London,” from “Songs of Experience” and Shelley’s A Song: “Men of England.”

What does it mean to be human? William Blake, an 18th century English poet, artist, and philosopher asked these questions, often masqueraded under a wall of color, and rhyme. Through seemingly childish, almost nursery-esq poems, Blake teases us to think about who we are, and ask ourselves things that challenge who we are as a species. Often his poems were sister pairs that mirrored each other in theme and appearance. For example, his poem “The Lamb” a poem about innocence and divine creation, is mirrored by “The Tyger,” a look at experience, and a subtle inquiry at why the divine creator of the lamb, would create such an evil as a tiger. The same can be said about two of his other poems, “The Chimney Sweeper” and “Infant Sorrow,” whose themes deal with again, innocence and experience, in a Taoism manner of thinking. Blake uses archetypes of innocence and experience in “The Lamb, “The Tyger,” The Chimney Sweeper,” and “Infant Sorrow.”

The English mystical poet and artist created a series of monotypes on Isaac Newton, a rational thinker whose theories he opposed. Blake believed in spiritual visions while Newton, as a scientist, saw God as distant and less significant to scientific discoveries. This paper will explore Blake's manner and style in expressing his strong feelings about Enlightenment thinkers and scientists, using dramatic imagery of Newton as subject to illustrate Blake's

Romanticism is described as the period across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following The Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, that enlightened artists and philosophers developed and expressed revolutionary responses to injustices at the time. On such revolutionary was poet artist William Blake. Blake lived and wrote in England at a time when the Christian Church and Industrialisation held utmost power over people. The philosophic writer saw such values and attitudes as crimes against nature and human nature and sought to protest. William Blake, in his protesting works like Garden of Love and A Little Boy Lost, through the use of irony, sarcasm, aesthetic and metaphor, expresses concerns of corrupted 18th and 19th century Britons.

Through this, Blake is showing the hypocrisy of religion, a theme commonly shown throughout “Experience.” Throughout “Innocence” a simple, child-like portrayal of religion is explored. This could show Blake as primarily a religious poet as there are common, simple themes running throughout many of his poems in “Innocence.” This simple view of both Christ and religion contrasts the complex metaphors used to represent religion in “Innocence.”

William Blake focused on biblical images in the majority of his poetry and prose. Much of his well-known work comes from the two compilations Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The poems in these compilations reflect Blake's metamorphosis in thought as he grew from innocent to experienced. An example of this metamorphosis is the two poems The Divine Image and A Divine Image. The former preceded the latter by one year.

The two poems that have to deal with the philosophies of human nature are William Blake’s “The Tyger” and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Blake’s poem is based off the Romantics and Walt Whitman is an American Naturalist that is based off free verse a form that he created.

Blake uses traditional symbols of angels and devils, animal imagery, and especially images of fire and flame to: 1) set up a dual world, a confrontation of opposites or "contraries" which illustrate how the rules of Reason and Religion repress and pervert the basic creative energy of humanity, 2) argues for apocalyptic transformation of the self "through the radical regeneration of each person's own power to imagine" (Johnson/Grant, xxiv), and 3) reconstructs Man in a new image, a fully realized Man who is both rational and imaginative, partaking of his divinity through creativity. The form of the poem consists of "The Argument," expositions on his concepts of the "contraries" and of "expanded perception" which are both interspersed with "Memorable Fancies" that explicate and enlarge on his expositions, and concludes with "A Song of Liberty," a prophecy of a future heaven on earth.

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.

The works of William Blake cannot be entirely discussed, so my project particularly focuses on 'Songs of Innocence and Experience'.

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.