William Blake Research Paper

Katie Layman Mrs. Laine Comp 2 December 12, 2008 Innocence versus Experience Even though many things can affect what people believe, William Blake expresses his religious views through the innocence of childhood leading to the experience of sin. Blake’s writing has frown in interest in the 19th century, but the 20th century has put his works in the spotlight. Blake is known for his renowned books: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, among many of his other works such as The Four Zoas. In Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience the main theme of the poems is Blake’s belief that children lose their “innocence” as they are introduced to the ways of the cruel world. The poems represent how children are born innocent, but as they
W.B. Yeats certified in his criticism that Blake “announced the religion of art” and “understood it more perfectly than the thousands of subtle spirits who have received its baptism in the world about us”. It also becomes apparent in the reading that he was a symbolist that invented his own mythology because he did not want to conform to someone else’s. In Leopold Damrosch’s criticism of William Blake, he argues that the two most compelling reasons to read Blake’s works are for “his exploration of the possibilities and limits of the symbol, and his passionate demand for moral commitment”. Throughout Williams Blake’s life, he had many events that led him to write, as well as many events that are reflected in his writing. William Blake was born on November 28, 1757, in London as the second born son to a hosier and a haberdasher. At a very early stage in life Blake began to see visions. Whether or not they were true mystical visions, it is still a question to many, but in Brian Willkie’s biographical essay of Blake, he argues that it is “best to regard them not as hallucinations but as the artist’s intense spiritual and sensory realization of the
I wander through each chartered street, Near where the chartered Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of man, In every infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forged manacles I hear. How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry Every black’ning Church appalls; And the hapless Soldier’s sigh Runs in blood down the Palace walls. But most through midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlot’s curse Blasts the new-born infant’s tear, And blights with plague the Marriage hearse. When the poem reads, “Runs in blood down Palace walls” and “Blasts the new-born infant’s tear”, there is a central conflict between life and death and innocence and experience. Life is created with the new-born baby, and as Blake views is born innocent. The blood running down the palace walls is a symbol of death, and how along with death comes experience in knowing the cruelties and the truths of the world. William Blake became a major pioneer for writing in his time, because he chose to make his own mythology and not conform to what the world wanted him to be, which “kept him more simply a poet than