Critics

Henry Crabb Robinson (1811)

A contemporary of Blake, to whom Blake said “[Jesus Christ] is the only God … And so am I and so are you.”

Peter Ackroyd

They didn’t disturb Blake’s moral compass because “should you focus on heaven and ignore hell, you mistakenly believe that heaven is everything” but “if you understand both, you truly grasp why it is you choose to face heaven.”

John Higgs on “The Lamb” & “The Tyger”

“The original message: don’t worry, for God has made a just world — has morphed into the question whether the same God was responsible for making the monsters that also prowl this earth…Crucially, Blake is content to ask these questions and leave the answers to the reader.”

Matt Simpson

“In this poem we witness a child directly entering the world of Experience at the point of birth and recognising in doing so that its world is associated with pain, sorrow, and resentment.”

K.A. Osborne

“In the postlapsarian “Garden of Love” … nature has become a controlled object which has been transformed by religion.”

Nasser Emdad

“Blake wants to perform two roles simultaneously. Firstly, he wants to preach his spiritual beliefs as a visionary Christian. Secondly, he wants to reform society as a critic of social and political evils of his times.”

Iain Sinclair

“It’s impossible to detach Blake’s spiritual beliefs from the radical political beliefs, because they all grew out of the same soil.”

E.D. Hirsch

“The natural harmonies in “The Ecchoing Green” are sacramental…just as meaning resides within the natural world, so the realm of eternity also resides within the human breast.”

Simon Mold

“Partly a celebration of the joys of personal freedom and partly a series of protests”

Simon Mold on Songs of Innocence

“A vision of happy, fulfilled childhood free of artificial shackles and constraints”

Simon Mold on Songs of Experience

“Exposed a real world in which authority stifles imagination”

Kevin Hutchings

“The apparent simplicity of Blake’s pastoral poetry hides some remarkable allegorical complexities”

Ross Wilson on imagery

Auditory imagery in Blake’s poetry are a “damning indictment on the society in which they are uttered”

Ross Wilson on Blake’s beliefs

“Blake is a fearless critic of the central tenets of institutionalised Christian religion”

David Smith

“Blake reaffirms the orthodoxy of moral didacticism and social control” 

Mark Yates

“Created an entire mythology through a series of interconnected works”

Srigley

Shows ‘Blake’s conviction that the Church’s condemnation of sexuality as intrinsically shameful has caused a widespread social and psychological sickness’

Eaves

Shows Blake’s ‘lifelong preoccupation with the tension between liberty…and the limitations of Georgian society’

Jacobson

The poem creates a “memorable fancy…to reveal the repressive nature of conventional morality and institutional religion”

Roti

 London is ‘a bitter lament on the moral and political conditions of London’

István D. Rácz

Facing contemporary history helped Blake … find the aesthetic qualities matching his radical ideas.