William Blake Research Paper

William Blake and the Romantic Era (1757-1827) Romanticism is a movement in art and literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in revolt against Neoclassicism of the previous centuries. The German poet Friedrich Schlegel who is given credit for first using the term romantic to describe literature, defined it as “literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form.” The romantic period is believed to have begun with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s ‘Lyrical Ballads’ and ended with the death of the novelists, Sir Walter Scott and Goethe. This period coincides with what can be called the age of revolutions including the American (1776), the French (1789) as well as the Industrial and Napoleonic wars.

He says, “Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.” Through this poem he presents the opposites as posed by the Catholic teaching- of good and evil, of angels and demons of heaven and hell. Blake rightly said, “The Nature of my work is Visionary or Imaginative; it is an Endeavor to Restore what the Ancients called the Golden Age.” (Johnson/Grant, xxiv). According to him, Religion has widened the gap between the two, by letting the good repress the evil. In his poem he has portrayed the demons as witty and intellectual like a sage whereas the angels as rather stupid, as a sort of blunder and a little aggressive when they are betrayed. Thus hell is made to be seen as a decent and respectable place while heaven is seen as a rather damned pace. In Blake’s world, a human being should accept both the force s of nature just as the predator has come to a kind of a compromise with his prey; the predator cannot absolutely blot out his prey as it would simply imply his demise. In this book, Blake displays the Proverbs of Hell which is opposed to the biblical Book of Proverbs. His proverbs ae paradoxical and provocative and thus work to strengthen our potential and energize our thoughts. Biblical proverbs are considered to be intellectual sayings that documented religious truths through flashes of vision. Blake makes use of satire and a shock element that forces people to rethink about the Bible, God and their very