book1789/1794

Songs of Innocence and Experience

Disciplines:

Summary

Blake's paired collections — Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) — presenting two contrary states of the human soul through deceptively simple poems.

Core Contribution

The 'two contrary states': Innocence (the Lamb, the shepherd, the divine child) and Experience (the Tyger, the chimney sweeper, London) as complementary perspectives, neither complete without the other. 'Tyger Tyger burning bright': Blake's most famous poem — the creator who could make both the Lamb and the Tyger as an image of the divine. 'London': the most compressed indictment of industrial society in English poetry. The illuminated book form: every copy hand-colored, each unique.

Key Spikes & Highlights

'Tyger Tyger burning bright' is probably the most anthologized poem in English — its unanswered question ('Did he who made the Lamb make thee?') is one of the purest expressions of the problem of evil in literature.
Blake hand-colored every copy of his illuminated books — fewer than 30 copies of the combined Songs survive. The printing process was his own invention: relief etching, the reverse of conventional intaglio.

Historical Influences

Emanuel Swedenborg Thomas Chatterton

Intellectual Lineage

English Romanticism Radical Dissent

Allied Works

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Milton Jerusalem

Contemporaries & Peers

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Milton

Minds Influenced

English Romanticism All of Blake's later work

Intellectual Posterity

Romanticism English Poetry

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