William Blake Context
- Created by: 14storey_s
- Created on: 06-02-21 16:49
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- William Blake
- Made illustrations
- Religion - heaven/hell
- Suffering/evil
- The sublime
- Trained at Royal Academy
- Songs of Innocence/ Songs of Experience
- Experience = represents life in its true form after having experienced the negative reality
- The two contrary states of the human soul
- Innocence = lighter and hopeful and observational of the positive aspects of life
- The Tyger vs The Lamb
- Innocence anticipates experience
- Songs of Innocence published first in 1789, experience was never published alone
- Spiritual Visions
- Saw visions -> tree of angels, figures at the window of his bedroom
- Throughout his lifetime
- Didn't need to take drugs as he already had a heightened perception that others sought through drugs
- Visionary prophet = saw London as a holy city/ New Jerusalem
- Buried in a non-conformist burial ground in London
- Industrial Revolution
- Early critic of Industrialisation
- Effects of labour on the body, chimney sweeps, soliders, prostitutes
- Sees religion tied up with government power and government oppression
- Christianity
- Saw Bible as poetic inspiration "sublime of the Bible"
- Developed own intensely personal version of religion
- From a dissenting family
- Had faith in human redemption
- Songs of Innocence = pastoral/Biblical imagery
- Songs of Innocence and Experience cover shows Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden
- Particularly interested in the Fall - saw it as being caused by human desire to construct institutions that restrain and constrain people's desires and freedoms
- Childhood
- Metres used in poems associated with nursery rhymes
- His poetry contrasts didactic religious 18thC childrens' verse
- Blake, like Rousseau and Locke, emphasises childhood innocence and benevolent natural tendencies
- Opposed what society did to children, e.g. young boys dying as chimney sweeps
- Believed children began life in heaven and so the closest to God on Earth
- Made illustrations
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