Background

What characterises Songs of Innocence as unsual?

What characterises Songs of Innocence as unsual?

Most Children’s literature at the time was moralistic, instructing children on correct behaviour. Blake’s Innocence poems depict children simply as they are — e.g. in “Laughing Song”

What did Blake’s biographer (Alexander Gilchrist) say of Blake that proved his support for the French revolution (1789-99)?

He said he had worn a red bonnet of liberty in support of the revolution.

What Anti-Catholic riot was Blake involved in? How might this have further motivated his ideology?

The 1780 “No Popery” Gordon riots — boys were hung up on temporary gibbets as a warning against peacebreakers

Through whom did Blake have further connections to those involved in the French Revolution (1789-99)?

He had a working relationship with the publisher Joseph Johnson for 2 decades — through him he had associations with Godwin, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

When and to whom was Blake an engraver?
How did this affect his ideas?

In August 1772 Blake became an apprentice engraver to James Basire, who would send Blake to the Gothic churches in London such as Westminster Abbey to copy images.

What work of Mary Wollstonecraft did Blake illustrate? What ideas does it share?

Original Stories from Real Life (2nd edition, 1791, which shared ideas about sexual equality & the institution of marriage.

What are Blake’s connections to Swedenborg? (3)

• He owned & annotated at least 3 of his books

• He shared ideas with him about religious reform, sexual liberation, and slavery abolition

• However he didn’t agree with the movement’s emphasis on the avoidance of sin — he felt that he didn’t grasp the idea of contraries that Blake deemed necessary

What idea did Blake share with Jean Jacques Rousseau?

Rousseau complained in the Preface to Emile (1762) that “man is born and dies a slave”—even giving the example of children being bound by their swaddles as infants.
Blake studied Rousseau’s writings and supported this view that childhood should be an extended period of freedom and personal exploration.

Songs of Innocence was published in the same year as …? What does this mean?

The French Revolution (1789-99)
Therefore only SOE was influenced by it

Why may Blake be less inspired than other poets by traditional literary sources?

He was self-educated and didn’t have the Classical education of other poets.

What is significant about the intentions with Songs of Innocence?

They were also published alone, which SOE never was. Therefore it was intended both for children and adults to enjoy.

What is significant about the arrangement of the collections?

Blake rearranged the SOI collection at least 19 times, and some of them were moved over to the SOE collection.

What is a dissenter and how are they relevant to Blake?

Blake came from a dissenting family – dissenters are Christians that did not subscribe to the doctrines of the CofE, nor to the role that it played in the state of the 18th Century

Blake was from […] society.

Georgian.

Why is Blake being considered a Romantic a complicated case?

Blake was not famous during his lifetime — nor until 100 years after his death; he was posthumously added to the Romantic canon. Therefore, their sweeping ideology is not so plain in this case — for example, Blake did not see nature as the worldly divinity to its end; Blake saw divinity within the human spirit.

Also, Blake would have resisted such a label.

Characteristics of Romanticism. (8)

• Childhood innocence as a theme

• Liberation theme & imagery of shackles/nets/cages

• Pastoral imagery

• Freedom from rules, institutions, and dogmas

• Solitary life rather than life in society

• Reaction against the scientific and logical nature of the Enlightenment period

• Primacy of the imagination

• Search for the sublime

Characteristics of Blake. (8)

• Simple imagery that contrasts the heaviness of the issues he explores

• Contraries

• Biblical allusions

• Ambiguous use of simple images

• Music

• Sensory imagery (particularly auditory)

• Questions & answers

• Nursery rhymes and rhythms that oppose the complexity of the content of the poem

Typical symbols used by Blake. (7)

• Lambs vs tigers

• Birds vs cages/nets

• Flowers — lilies and roses are often contrasted as purity vs sin

• Adults vs children

• Blackness vs whiteness

• Songs/music

• Gardens/greenery vs urban images like churches and palaces

When was Songs of Innocence first published alone?

1789

When was Songs of Innocence and of Experience first published?

1794

How is Blake connected to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)?

William Blake did illustrations for the epic. It narrates the fall of man — focusing on the rebellion of Satan, who was originally the favourite angel of God until committing acts of hubris, and the fall of man as Adam and Eve or expelled from Eden. The themes are free will, disobedience, and the consequences of sin.

When was the Industrial Revolution?

1760—1840

How did the Industrial Revolution affect labour? (4)

• Transition from handmade local goods to machine-made & trading

• People worked longer hours for little pay & often in hazardous conditions such as mines

• Populations rose quickly and people had to urbanise to make an income

• Class divisions intensified

What was the Enlightenment era?

A European intellectual movement which promoted reasoning, logic, and skepticism.
This era valued science, invention, and laws based upon rationality & logical reasoning based on factual principles — a sharp contrast to the Romanticists.

Name one famous Enlightenment thinker

John Locke

When was the Enlightenment era?

17 & 18th Centuries

What 3 cultural shifts occurred in Georgian England?

• Industrial Revolution (1760—1840)

• Emergence of Romanticism

• Expansion of the British Empire

How is Blake connected to the “free love” movement?

Blake is sometimes considered a forerunner of the 19th-Century “free love” movement alongside Mary Wollstonecraft — a broad reform tradition starting in the 1820s that saw marriage as slavery and wanted to free sexual activity from the bounds of state.

When was the Pickering Manuscript written?

c1800-1807, when Blake was in his 40s

When was Poetical Sketches published?

1783 however some of the poems were written in Blake’s teenage years