If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. Good morning/afternoon ladies, I am William Blake, not Wordsworth; Blake, a romantic poet. I was born in 1757, in the Soho district of London, England. I was not only a poet but also a painter and a printmaker. Since I was young, I had these beautiful ‘visions’. I saw a God’s head appear in a window and a tree filled with angels. You may think I was insane but really, I was not. I lived in the Romantic Period, the period of free emotion, adopting individuality and engrossing oneself in nature. We, the Romantic poets, wanted to change the ideas of the previous period, the Enlightenment. We were sick of the industrial society and the want of reasons and purposes behind everything. We believed that nature and emotion were the places in which one found spiritual truth. The idea of engrossing oneself in the natural and beautiful, or in some cases the natural and frightening as in the poem ‘The Tyger’, is distinctly romantic. When I composed ‘The Tyger’, a lyric poem, I tried to depict th...
While Romantics did seek inspiration in solitude and the grandeur of nature, it is difficult to say whether there is only one Romantic notion of the sublime. It is doubtful that the sublime we encounter in Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is the same as the sublime of ‘Tintern Abbey’. Wordsworth tells us how “… in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din / Of towns and cities” he has received “tranquil restoration” from the memory of nature, and how this has sometimes led to the realization of a gift of “aspect more sublime”, which is a trance-like state, a “classical religious meditation” (Wlecke, 158) in which he can “see into the life of things” (lines 36-49). This seems to be a notion of the sublime that gradually reveals itself through the interaction between the human mind and the objects of its contemplation. Moreover, this philosophical gift is “abundant recompense” (line 89) for something that he has lost – the ability to be moved at a level below that of thought, by the sublime aspect of nature. At the time of his visit five years before, he had been “more like a man ...
Although many of the Romantic poets displayed a high degree of anxiety concerning the way in which their works were produced and transmitted to an audience, few, if any, fretted quite as much as William Blake did. Being also a highly accomplished engraver and printer, he was certainly the only one of the Romantics to be able to completely move beyond mere fretting. Others may have used their status or wealth to exert their influence upon the production process, but ultimately, they were at the mercy of editors, publishers, and printers and relied on others to turn their visions into published works. Blake, on the other hand, was his own editor, engraver, printer, and publisher. He was able to control to the minutest detail every single aspect of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell from conception all the way to the selling of the finished volume. Short of being his own purchaser, Blake achieved the highest possible degree of control over the work’s transmission, and considering that there are only nine known complete copies of the work (twelve total including variants and uncolored prints), even the audience itself was almost handpicked (Ackroyd, 265).
There are many social errors all around us. From the misuse of social media, to the perception of idolizing the lives of celebrities. We are blindsided by the luxury of money and fame, that we forget the small joys in nature and life. William Blake noticed these same misperceptions and strove to break the social norm in literature. He stated, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” Blake worked to stray from common thought and experience by claiming that mystical visions inspired his works or poetry and art work. William Blake uses archetypes in his poems The Lamb, The Tyger, The Chimney Sweeper, and Infant Sorrow,
William Blake, was born in 1757 and died in 1827, created the poems “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” and Proverbs of Hell. Blake grew up in a poor environment. He studied to become an Engraver and a professional artist. His engraving took part in the Romanticism era. The Romanticism is a movement that developed during the 18th and early 19th century as a reaction against the Restoration and Enlightenment periods focuses on logic and reason. Blake’s poetry would focus on imagination. When Blake created his work, it gained very little attention. Blake’s artistic and poetic vision consists in his creations. Blake was against the Church of England because he thought the doctrines were being misused as a form of social control, it meant the people were taught to be passively obedient and accept oppression, poverty, and inequality. In Blake’s poems “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” and Proverbs of Hell, he shows that good requires evil in order to exist through imagery animals and man.
His spiritual beliefs reached outside the boundaries of religious elites loyal to the monarchy. “He was inspired by dissident religious ideas rooted in the thinking of the most radical opponents of the monarchy during the English Civil War” (E. P. Thompson). Concern with war and the blighting effects of the industrial revolution were displayed in much of his work. One of Blake’s most famous works is The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Experience. In this collection, Blake illuminates the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children and follow them into adulthood.... ...
During a period of Romanticism and a strong appreciation for literature, William Blake proved to the literary world that “Imagination is a doorway to the infinite.” Blake was more than just your average poet; he was a creator of beauty. His work came alive through the words and illustrations he hand made and published. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are Blake’s two symphonies of words that convey the juxtaposing ideas of human nature. “The Poison Tree” is the perfect representation of the experience aspect of Blake’s work due to the way it pulls the reader to ”disillusionment with human nature and society.” It leaves the reader in awe of the capability of humans and causes us to reflect on our own decadent actions in correlation to one of the seven deadly sins; the wrath of human beings.
‘It is often suggested that the source for many of William Wordsworth’s poems lies in the pages of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. Quite frequently, Dorothy describes an incident in her journal, and William writes a poem about the same incident, often around two years later.’ It is a common observation that whilst Dorothy is a recorder – ‘her face was excessively brown’ – William is a transformer – ‘Her skin was of Egyptian brown’ . The intertextuality between The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals and ‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’ allows both Dorothy and William to write about the same event, being equally as descriptive, but in very differing ways. Dorothy writes in a realist ‘log-book’ like style, whereas William writes in a romantic ballad style. This can be very misleading, as it gives William’s work more emotional attachment even though his work is drawn upon Dorothy’s diary, which in its turn is very detached, including little personal revelation. When read in conjunction with William’s poetry, Dorothy’s journal seems to be a set of notes written especially for him by her. In fact, from the very beginning of the journals Dorothy has made it quite clear that she was writing them for William’s ‘pleasure’ . This ties in with many of the diary entries in which she has described taking care of William in a physical sense. In a way this depicts the manner in which William uses his sister’s journal to acquire the subject of his poetry, which makes it seem as though Dorothy is his inspiration.
A main movement during the nineteenth century, British Romanticism, stressed the idea that people are still connected to nature. It was a movement that was meant to rebel against the Enlightenment movement because Romanticism valued emotion, passion, and individuality while the Enlightenment valued philosophy and politics. In “A Poison Tree” William Blake demonstrates the romantic idea of using nature to explain the meaning of his poem. “A Poison Tree” tells a story of how bottling one’s anger inside causes that anger to grow and causes great destruction. The poem starts off by saying how the speaker is angry with his friend, and the speaker expresses his feelings towards the friend. Therefore, the anger disappears and shows how goodwill and friendship can help erase any problems. It illustrates that love and friendship overpower anger. But what happens when there is distrust and enmity with a foe? The lack of love and friendship towards a foe will cause the anger to continue to grow and will transform into destruction that can harm others and oneself. This poem is filled with metaphors that demonstrate the importance of communication and expressing one’s feelings. The use of imagery, the switching of the tense, the avoidance of the murder scene, and the symbolism of the apple in “A Poison Tree” all help demonstrate how bottling one’s anger inside can make oneself dangerously bitter and even murderous.
The vision of an angel made William Blake the most famous poet of his time. William Blake was born over his father’s modest hosiery shop at 28 Broad Street Golden Square, London in Nov, 28, 1757. His father was James Blake a hosier, and his mother was Catherine Wright Armitage Blake. William Blake being chiefly educated at home learned how to read and write by his mother. He briefly attended to school. His parents observe that he was different and they didn’t force him to attend to the school, main reason why his mother decided to teach him. “They did observe that he was different from his peers and did not force him to attend conventional school.” Later on Blake saw as a positive matter, later writing “Thank god I never was sent to school.” Apparently William Blake was a special boy, and a true believer of religion. When Blake was four years old, he told his parent that he saw a vision of god. “From early childhood, Blake spoke of having visions—at four he saw God "put his head to the window.” Couple year later around age nine William experiences new vision this time he saw an angel. “Around age nine, while walking through the countryside, he saw a tree filled with angels.” Those visions changed William life. At age of ten William expressed to his parents that he wanted to be a painter. Later on his father sent him to a drawing school. “At age ten, Blake expressed a wish to become a painter, so his parents sent him to drawing school.” Two years later William began to writing poetry.
During the Romantic Era (1750-1870), poets used nature as a common motif as they believed it was an extension of the human being. One such poet, William Blake, famously wrote “And we are put on this earth a little space that we might learn to bear the beams of love.” A common theme of his writing on the subject of love is the juxtaposition of innocent love and experienced love. For example, both poems, “The Clod and the Pebble” and “The Sick Rose” which first appeared in his book Songs of Innocence and Experience in 1789, generally follow a similar rhyme scheme and development as with all the poems contained within this book. The first half of each poem relates to innocent love, followed by a rhyme scheme discord to represent a turning point,
Wordsworth's Poetry A lot of literature has been written about motherhood. Wordsworth is a well known English poet who mentions motherhood and female strength in several of his poems, including the Mad Mother, The Thorn, and The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman. This leads some critics to assume that these poems reflect Wordsworth's view of females. Wordsworth portrays women as dependent on motherhood for happiness, yet he also emphasizes female strength.
Because of Blake’s support of Rousseau’s noble savage, his poetry is somewhat anti-Enlightenment, a characteristic of Romanticism. Another Romantic ideal was the beauty of the natural world, which opposed the Enlightened thinkers of the Industrial Revolution. Finally, Blake’s usage of a child, who is speaking to animals that are unable to respond, demonstrates the Romantic belief in the “importance of feelings and imagination over reason” (Romanticism 699). William Blake’s “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” are excellent examples of Romantic literature that supports Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s myth of the noble savage.
Children are always portrayed in books as angelic beings that are the closest to being perfect since they are innocent and pure. Many would suggest that this is not true, that children can be just as finable as adults. They cry when they do not get their way and throw tantrums that are quite obscene. However, the idea of this angelic child did not come into play until the 18th century. The poets William Blake and William Wordsworth are the two poets that coined this idea of the child. In the poems of these two authors, children are portrayed as innocent and pure beings and are closer to God than adults. Although these two poets have very different views of what children are like such as their interactions with adults, their perspective on
In the first stanza, the poet seems to be offering a conventional romanticized view of Nature:
William Blake is considered to be one of the greatest poets of British history. He wrote poems in such a unique way which made him stand out through his illustrations and ideas. Blake was from the 19th century English Romantic period, his writing style made it possible for the common people to understand since he wanted to make it accessible to them. This was a time when poets valued imagination and emotion as well as the concern with the particular human being. As a young boy, Blake had visions that he said to be the source of his inspiration (Allen, 1072). His parents did all they could to discourage his “gift” but then they realized that he was different and Blake got home schooled. His imagination definitely stayed with him as he grew up