to speak out boldly

7/27/2019 To Speak Out Boldly

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It is amazing how, by just reading a very simple four-lined poem one can free oneself

from the ropes of reason and plunge into the spirit of an age. And it is especially with

Romanticism that imagination and subjectivity take the lead and transport us to a world where

the concepts of innocence, experience, emotion, religion, nature, love and time start to be seen

under a different light, a romantic shade which reflects the values, beliefs and opinions of one of

the most turbulent eras in history. As the French writer Charles Nodier summed up in his artists

plight in 1820: Romantic poetry springs from our agony and despair; this is not a fault in our

art, but a necessary consequence of the advances made in our progressive society.

Through the development of this paper, I will try to study under a romantic light the

works of one of the first representatives of the Romantic Movement in England: William Blake.

The words Innocence, Revolution, Irony, and Justice will be of transcendental importance in

analysing the creations of this poet, engraver, painter and musician as a product of the 18 th

Century England.

In order to understand Blakes work as a reflection of and, at the same time, reaction to

his own times, we must first shed some light on the characteristics of the political, social and

artistic life of the Romantic England. Only after studying the characteristics of this era of

revolution we will be able to unveil the underlying meanings present in most of Blakes works,

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and we will understand how the poets words: The times require that one should speak out

boldly 1 carry in themselves the essence of Romanticism.

In order to grasp the essence of this era, I will try to trace it from its very origins. The

birth of the word Romanticism can be traced back to the Middle Ages. Back then, the word

romance denoted the new vernacular languages derived from Latin. A roman or romantcame

to be known as an imaginative work and a courtly romance. In France a distinction was made

between the terms romanesque (which acquired derogative connotations, such as exaggerated,

bizarre, chimerical) and romantique (which meant tender, gentle, sentimental and sad). It was

used in the English form, romantic, in these latter senses as from the 18th Century.

The introduction of this term in the literary contexts of those times came with the

German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel. He described the romantic as that which depicts

emotional matter in an imaginative form. His brother August implied that romantic literature is

in contrast to that of classicism, thus describing one of its most outstanding characteristics.

Quite early in the 18th C, one can discern an air of sensibility and feeling, particular in

relation to the natural order and Nature, and it is with the presence of these characteristics that

we can establish the setting in motion of the literary Romantic Movement in Europe. 2

From the beginning of the 18 th Century, Romanticism was mostly associated with its

radical opposition to classicism. The literary critic Margaret Drabble describes the Romantic

essence as:

the emphasis on emotion, imagination, individuality and a certain sense of

opposition to what had gone before, namely the Enlightment of the late 17th

and 18th centuries with its espousal of reason as the key to all

understanding.3

The idea that Romanticism stood in opposition to the order and formal symmetry of

what was called the Classical, or Neo Classical, with its strong emphasis on civilised good

order, is present in many works of those times, not only in literature but also in painting and

music. This indeed is the spirit of Romanticism: it must constantly re invent, rediscover and re

assert itself, and by doing so it gets in contact with an independent, subjective experience of

reality, as the German poet Novalis held:

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The world must be romanticised. So its original meaning will again be

found. To romanticize is nothing other than an exponential heightening4

This constant seeking to dismantle the traditional conventions can be thought of as a

consequence of the artists frustrations by the limitations of the Enlightment ideals to place

reason over emotion. As a result, Romantic artists valued the concept of subjectivity highly.

They all (Romantic Poets) see the implication of imagination, symbol,

myth and organic nature, and see it as part of the great endeavour to overcome

the split between subject and object, the self and the world, the conscious and

the unconscious. This is the central creed of the great Romantic poets in

England, Germany and France. It is a closely coherent body of though and

feeling 5

The importance of feeling and emotion over reason can be clearly felt in Baudelaires

words: Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor in exact truth, but in

a way of feeling. The form and meaning of the subjective experience often aspired to a

spiritual, quasi mystical significance which was later expressed in the highly symbolic and

religious language characteristic of the Romantic Movement, posing a real or sometimes

perceived threat to established religion and its values.

Generally, this subjective and quasi mystical experience took place in natural

environments, where the poet or painter could establish an intimate connection with his or her

soul, so much so that veneration of Nature was akin to a religious experience, just at a period

when the forces of civilisation, with industrialization and urbanization, were posing a great

danger to the English natural surroundings.

Together with this admiration for Nature, Romantic artists also praised and focused

their reflections on the state of innocence in human beings, valuing the senses of wonder and

alienation from the evils of experienced, mature society. This constant seeking of innocence,

and its subsequent rejection to all forms of social control, tinted the Romantic Movement with a

sense of revolutionary change that the artists of that time didnt hesitate to acquire. Politically,

poets and painters of this era were in favour of radical, or even revolutionary change, so much

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so that patriotism, nationalism, revolution and armed struggle for independence also became

popular themes in the arts of this period. One of the Romanticism's key ideas and most enduring

legacies is the assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic art and

political philosophy.

From the beginning of the 18th Century onwards, Western Europe experienced political

and social revolutions the like and the speed of which had never previously been experienced.

Overshadowing all other events was the cataclysmic influence of the French Revolution of 1789

which sharpened the historical sense in a way that no other event had ever done6: The impact

of the Revolution, the Terror, the rise of Napoleon, was seen by many as sharply dividing the

past from a new type of future. It implied a new way of looking at history, a new conception of

reality. For some this was a terrifying prospect, for others it was greeted optimistically. For the

Romantics this early optimism turned to disappointment and disillusion when realising that the

results of a revolution which sacrificed its people for the cause of freedom was, in a way,

repeating the past and enslaving the minds to a certain kind of thought. Therefore, Romantic

attitudes closely accompanied revolution, radicalism and subsequently, disappointment.

In the field of politics the romantics were intensely active in both thought and deed. The

focus changed away from the concerns of royalty and the aristocracy as somehow embodying

the affairs of state, towards far more democratic notions of politics. By 1821 the Romantic poet

Percy Bysshe Shelley was able to claim in his A defence of poetry that poets revealed less

their spirit than the spirit of the age and are the unacknowledged legislators of the world 7.

This idea of the democratic power held by poets in Romantic times was later developed by

Marilyn Gaull in her bookEnglish Romanticism and the Human Context:

When Homer sang of national wars, or Chaucer performed at court, or

Shakespeare dramatised the chronicles of kings, politics and poetry shared

the same frame of reference: the activities and interests of the aristocracy, the

centre of political power. But during the romantic period, poets became

active in political activities that had no poetic precedence, for they lived in an

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age of democratic revolution, engaged in political dissent, and identified with

the people 8

War and revolution can be especially dramatic examples of historical change, but less

dramatic contextual factors were also at work during this period, effecting profound and lasting

social and economic changes along Western Europe. Crucially, the Romantic period saw both

economic expansion and hardship through the development of Capitalism. During this period,

Western Europe witnessed a growth in its population, an expansion on trade and industry,

therefore, a quickening pace of social change, so that the idea conveyed in the phrase Industrial

Revolution is as important as the political change resulting from it. Accompanying these

changes was a dramatic expansion of economic markets into continents outside Europe as a

consequence of a growth of imperialism and the exploitation of these areas as a source of raw

materials for the Industrial Revolution. The darkest side of this imperialist venture was the slave

trade and here Romantics played a significant part in leading opposition to slavery. Blake, for

example, implicitly acknowledged the horror of slavery in his poem The Little Black Boy:

And we are put on earth a little space,

That we may learn to bear the beams of love,

And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face

Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove 9

Since culture serves as a mirror of society, the arts reflected the tensions, conflicts and

signs of transition which characterised these turbulent times. Literature, like all arts, like

language, is a collective activity strongly conditioned by social forces, what needs to be said or

what is allowed to say in a particular community at a specific time. We should not forget that

authors are, first of all citizens, and that within any community opinions, values, tastes are

socially generated. As Marilyn Butler puts it: Though writers are gifted with tongues to

articulate the Spirit of the Age, they are also moulded by the age. 10

As a result of its turbulent characteristics, The Romantic period was characterised by

intense spiritual confusion and seeking. The growth of rationalism and empiricism during the

Enlightment had doubtless led to a devaluation of religious experience in any immediate sense.

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Romanticism challenged this conventional stability through the restoration of spiritual

experience to the centre of human concerns. Romantic literature was frequently intimately

confessional, emphasising the uniqueness of individual experience through the use of the

imagination. The key word here is imagination, which for writers such as Blake and Coleridge

meant the visionary faculty, enabling spiritual insight into ultimate truth:

If the spectator could enter into these images in his imagination, if he

could make a friend and companion of these images of wonder then would he

arise from his grave, then would he meet the Lord in the air and then would he be

happy. General knowledge is remote knowledge; it is in particulars that wisdom

consists and happiness too. 11

One of the characteristics of Blakes work that makes it so interesting and in a way,

intense, is its use of diverse media. Since Blake believed that Painting, as well as poetry and

music, exists and exults in immortal thoughts12 it is appropriate that he used each of these sister

arts to express his artistic vision and in this way, making his creations so especial. As Blake saw

art as a whole, he would have probably known that lyric poetry, the poetry of powerful emotion

and personal introspection so privileged and fostered by the Romantics, derives its name from

lyre, the stringed instrument used by ancient poets in the performance of their odes. In this

way, his work Songs of Innocence and Experience gathers the three veins of art in itself: music,

present in the form of his work, together with the rhythm and cadence, poetry, with it powerful

intention to foster introspection and reflection and painting, in the creative process of engraving

which he himself applied to each of the poems in this collection.

In sketching designs, engraving plates, writing songs, and composing

music, he employed his time, with his wife sitting at his side, encouraging him in all

his undertakings. As he drew the figure, he meditated the song which was to

accompany it, and the music to which the verse was to be sung, was the offspring too

of the same moment. The first fruits of this process were the Songs of Innocence

and Experience 13

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As Blake understood the song as a social medium having the power to move listeners to

thoughtful critical reflection, he engaged himself in the writing of one of the most critical pieces

of poetry produced during the Romantic times: Songs of Innocence and Experience: Showing

the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. This work presents two groups of poems divided

into the titles of Innocence and Experience. The Songs are both for and about children, and talk

about what Blake saw as the liberating imaginative power and truthfulness of the state of

innocence:

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour. 14

The concept of childhood innocence is going to be one of the most important themes

across the poems, reflecting Blakes own feelings and thoughts as regards the treatment of

children in the Romantic England. Traditionally, childhood, if seen as separate from maturity at

all, was viewed simply as a means to an end: a preparation for adulthood during which

corrective measures were often taken with the purpose of installing the proper behaviour in the

juvenile minds. Coupled with economic hardship was a high infant mortality rate; indeed the

two were often linked: overworked, underfed children were unlikely to survive into adulthood.

Under these circumstances parents didnt make too great an emotional investment in their

children. What is more, the theological doctrine of original sin, embedded in official

Christianity, served to justify a negative view of childhood: experience was valued above

innocence in alleviating the effects of sinfulness.

However, for the Romantics a new vision of innocence gained ground, in which the

sense of wonder in childhood was valued as being similar to the sense of purity and newness

essential to imaginative creativity at any age. As we can see from the words of German

Philosopher, Friedrich Schiller: For, to declare it once and for all, Man plays only when he is,

in the full meaning of the word, Man, and is only wholly Man, when at play. 15

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By the time William Blake published his Songs of Innocence, one of the first and

fullest expressions of a Romantic position on childhood innocence, the tradition of celebrating

the visions of childhood had become diluted. The spirit of Romanticism placed the notion of

childhood innocence at its very centre. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of

Blake. In the introduction he wrote that this piece of art was devised To liberate adult

consciousness through a recovery of the key characteristics of innocence.

The subtitle of Songs from Innocence and Experience is Showing the two Contrary

States of the Human Soul. The word Contrary has a specific and important meaning in Blake:

For two thousand years Western thought had been intensely dualistic, seeing everything as

composed of warring opposites: head and heart, body and spirit, male and female, human and

non human, life and death, innocence and experience good and evil, heaven and hell, as though

the split between the hemispheres of the human brain were projecting itself on everything

perceived by that brain. 16

In Romantic times dualism had taken the Christian churches into the spiritually sterile

preoccupation with sin, defined in obsessively sexual terms. The churches seemed to be for

Blake the worst enemies of any true religion. Thus, by describing at the outset innocence and

experience as contrary states of the human soul Blake seems to be warning us that we are not

being invited to choose between them, and that we are not simply going to be offered here the

truism that innocent joy is preferable to the sorrows of experience. As we read his works, we

find ourselves engaged in a process of mental fight, the Blakean Ideal of critical exchange

according to which Opposition is true Friendship 17

As a result of this impossibility of separating the two opposite sides, there are many

poems from the Innocence section which he cannot keep out of the shadow of experience.

Several of the apparently carefree poems are deceptive when looked at more closely. One of the

first examples is the introduction: The illustration on the cover depicts a shepherd with his pipe,

led and inspired by the winged infant above him. In the poem, Blake seems to characterise

himself, the creative poet, as a piper, then a singer and finally as a writer:

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Piping down the valleys wild

Piping songs of pleasant glee

On a cloud I saw a child

And he laughing said to me

Pipe a song about a lamb

So I piped with merry cheer

Piper pipe that song again

So I piped; he wept to hear

Drop they pipe thy happy pipe

Sing thy songs of happy cheer

So I sung the same again

While he wept with joy to hear

Piper sit thee down and write

In a book that all may read

So he vanished from my sight

And I plucked a hollow reed

And I made a rural pen

And I stained the water clear

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear

This introductory poem can be read as a sort of manifesto of the role of the Romantic

poet: aiming at writing inspired by and intended to refresh the spirit of innocence, seeking to

capture the fleeting moment of imaginative vision. There is throughout the poem a pervading

sense of optimism, harmonious resolution of any conflict. However, a subtle reading of these

introductory lines may create a sense of doubt in the reader: the rural pen stained the water

clear perhaps suggesting the corruption of the purity of the original moment. These words

introduce the idea of sin and corruption. In the very act of celebrating childish innocence, the

poet corrupts it through its inability to prevent the shadow of his own experience falling over

the scene.

In many respects, Blakes attention to children and his preoccupation with the transition

from the world of innocence into the mature world, echo the thoughts and ideas of another

exponent of the Romantic thought: the Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau 18. Rousseaus

ideas can be seen, in a way, as an antithesis to those of Blake. He developed his thoughts

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through philosophical prose, whereas Blake did so in imaginative verse. Rousseau emphasised

the importance of careful social planning, while Blake praised intuition above all things.

Nevertheless, in the context of the development of the 18 th century thought, the two may be seen

as complementary figures: Rousseau analysed the ills of contemporary society as stemming

from a divorce between civilization and the original, innocent state of nature a state he saw as

fundamentally benign. Consequently, he concentrated his efforts on education, seeing childhood

development as continually replaying the change from nature to civilisation. In his work Du

Contract Social (The Social Contract) he proposed to establish a radical political, democratic

position. He opens his book with the famous words: Man is born free and everywhere he is in

chains Essentially, Rousseau saw the need to exchange something of the freedom of original

innocence for a harmonious social contract, while never losing sight of the fundamental, natural

values as a way of holding civilisation.19

Above all, when considering the social context of Romanticism, it is important to bear

in mind the balanced, essentially civilised nature of such a conception of society, as shared by

Blake and Rousseau and deriving from ideas on the fundamental innocence of humanity.

Ambivalence about the nature of innocence in a context of a harsh, exploitative world

becomes more marked when the Songs of Innocence are compared with their counterpart Songs

of Experience. Sleep, darkness and prison are the images Blake chooses to describe the state of

the soul once fallen into the world of experience. He calls this state single vision and Newtons

sleep. By single vision he meant vision which denies the contraries by insisting on the

primacy of fact and reason, reason uninformed by other human faculties and therefore a form of

blindness, reducing everything to the mechanical and material. This seemed to Blake to have

happened to the very soul of England and Western Society with the so called Enlightment of

the seventeenth century and the rising of mechanistic science.

Only a society which has lost its humanity under the veil of reason could have

perpetrated the evils of Blakes times. As we said before, he was deeply concerned with the

exploitation and persecution of children who, generally, were later condemned to slavery in the

mills, and often died there. However, deeper than these abuses seems to be the imposition by

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society on the young (beginning with parents, nurses and caretakers) of the false inauthentic

values of a society living in bad faith. Blake saw the concept of sin as a trap to bind mens

desires, and believed that obedience to a moral code imposed from the outside was against the

spirit of life.

Nowhere in Songs of Experience is this idea best expressed as in The Garden of

Love20. This poem tells the story of an unfortunate fall from Innocence into Experience, during

the course of which the speaker or singers natural sensual impulses become subject to

censorship and prohibition. The songs accompanying illustration depicts the process of social

conditioning whereby this state of affairs is brought about: doctrinal text in hand, priests in

black gowns, representatives of experience, lead youthful maidens in an apparently pious act of

prayer, but the tombstone and open grave toward which the three kneeling figures bend suggests

that the pious act, far from being life-affirming, is in fact a tribute to decay and death. Erecting

tomb-stones where flowers should be in short, religious orthodoxy, according to Blakes

view, replaces the childs world of carefree play with a world of sorrow and subjugation.

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And Thou shalt not, as the inscription that the door of the chapel reads, symbolises

the restriction in peoples free will imposed by religion. What is lost when people lose their

innocence is not any kind of prior wisdom, but liberty, liberty to be oneself and fulfil ones

desire. What is more, there is a kind of forgetting of the sense of atonement, at-one-ment: the

sense of being at home in the world, that moment when there is no clear distinction between

waking and dreaming: the poet feels that priests had bound with briars his joys and desires, in

a way that would be difficult to be himself again.

According to the literary critic Keith Sagar, the stages to free oneself from this single

vision imposed by the forces mature society that Blake so fervently condemns are:

First, to recognise the all-pervading symptoms of single vision as such,

and undertake the psychic journey out of its dark prison. Second, to release the

energies, which, by the damming of their natural channels, have been forced into

destructiveness, for their original creative purposes. Third, to recover innocence,

but a very different, mature, adult, strong innocence possible only on the far side

of experience. And finally to acquire the new vision which becomes available to

man when he has thrown off the mind forgd manacles. () Fourfold vision is

imagination, which is simply how we see when our vision is whole, not

fragmented, how we function when all our subtle senses are fully operational. It is

the divinity of fully realised humanity. 21

It is precisely this fully realised humanity what Blake seeks to convey in the act of

creating such a piece of art as Songs of Innocence and Experience. Among the other poems

present in this collection, we find interesting reflections on the nature of life and Gods

creations. Blake devotes one poem called The lamb 22 from the innocence section to celebrate

the perfect innocent figure of the lamb, together with the simplicity and blind confidence of a

child in his Christian faith. Adjectives such as meek, mild and tender are equally applied

to the lamb, the child and God. However, his need to confront and acknowledge the contrary of

the lamb, made Blake dive into darker waters and the result was The Tyger 23. These lines are

not intended to expound systematic thought, but to convey Blakes sense of awe, and the

difficulty of coping with the contraries when they are at their most mutually exclusive. The

poem has eleven question marks, and is in the interrogative mood throughout. The questions are

all variants of the same question: what god do we have to imagine capable of conceiving of a

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tiger, forging it, grasping the fire, clasping the deadly terrors necessary in the actual creation of

it? What sort of god would even want to create tigers? Certainly not the loving gentle god of the

Christian Tradition. The tigers symmetry is simultaneously fearful and incredibly beautiful. It

is a creature of the forests of the night where sunshine never penetrates; yet it burns brightly

with a fierce flame. Its light incarnate energy.

The deadly dualism which still causes us to divide the divine creation into the

acceptable (cuddly lambs) and the unacceptable (fierce tigers) applies equally to the sphere of

morality, where the more fiery human passions, such as desire, are rejected and degraded as

sins. To Blake nothing natural is evil; but the healing of this dualistic split in the human psyche

requires nothing less than a marriage of heaven (light, the lamb) and hell (darkness, the tiger) in

perfect symmetry. In this way, we can see how, for Blake, the tiger by no means stands for mere

hostility, but for a fluid synthesis of aggression and grace and a full acceptance of the life-

impulse beyond moral judgement 22

Having sailed through the turbulent waters of Blakes poetry, and having tasted not only

his anger and disillusion towards the society of his own times, but also his optimistic endeavour

to open the eyes of his readers towards a new kind of social consciousness, we come to our last

poem which, in a way reflects the state of events in England as seen through the poets eyes.

The poem entitled The Sick Rose presents the reader with a highly symbolic imagery:

The rose is an archetypal symbol, which means that it has been seized on by all cultures which

have known roses as symbolising very much the same range of human experience, and is

spontaneously recognised as doing so even by those who do not know what a symbol is. We are

all aware of the rose as a queen of flowers, beautiful, rich in colour, heady in perfume, sensuous

in texture, incurved, enfolding erotic promise. The last adjective we anticipate is sick.

Sickness, disease, corruption are not only contrary to all the primary meanings of rose, but

strike us as a violation of them, a sacrilege. The two words cancel each other out, leaving a

void, a chaos.25

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26

However, we can also read the rose as the traditional symbol of England as a country, as

a monarchy, which is sick from the excesses, represented as the invisible worm, which are

being perpetrated by her society. Blakes adjective for the worm is invisible, as he considers

the plague which is extending throughout Western Europe has a strongly ideological

component. It is invisible because it deals with ideas and values in a subtle way, by brain-

washing young minds, imposing ideals and norms which do nothing but restrict the freedom of

the English people. Interestingly, we find in this poem the dualism Blake has portrayed

throughout Songs from Innocence and Experience. In The Sick Rose he could come to terms

with the opposition and make it one entity: the poem suggests that all beauty is susceptible to

destruction. It can be read as a reminder that there is a good and evil side to all things - love can

be both joyful and painful, and all life includes a death component.

Conclusion

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In a time of profound and widespread social and political upheaval, the influence of the

Romantics was often considerable. Their involvement could take many forms, but perhaps the

nearest we can get to a common factor is a sense of creative expression shared by so many

romantics across a wide range of genres and styles. Poetry is one of the branches of art through

which these revolutionary artists could vent up their feelings and ideals, creating a style of their

own. Blakes poetry and paintings reflect his subjectivity and his strength in defending what he

thought as one of the most important human values: freedom. His words I must create a system

or be enslaved by another man's show the deep commitment he had towards art and its effect

on society. As the critic Marilyn Butler holds, For Blake, writing is doing, it is both defensive

and aggressive, it is as effective as war in the service of national strength. This is the mood we

find across his creations: his works generally show signs of deep emotional impact, qualities

such as innocence and wonder, child-like sensibilities, extremes of feeling verging on the

insanity, together with a sense of individuality often emphasised together with spiritual, ethical,

psychological and political explorations, usually questioning established views. Blake found the

source of inspiration not in the outside world but in the human mind itself, and to the human

mind and soul of his readers he devoted his work.

If Romanticism was born in opposition and sorrow, in social or national crisis and in

individual trauma, Blake stands as a consequence of the failure of these events to provide a

sense of comfort among society. He spent his artistic life seeking to create a compensating

revolution in hearts and minds, an alternative empire of the imagination27

Notes

1- Blake, William 1757-1827,A Descriptive Catalogue of an exhibition of the works of William

Blake in 1809 - Philadelphia Museum of Art Philadelphia 1939 4to.

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2- My ideas in these paragraphs are taken from the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and

Literary Theory. England, Penguin Reference Books, 1999.

3- Stevens, David.Romanticism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

4- Stevens, David. Op Cit. (Novalis was the pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von

Hardenberg, a German poet, author and philosopher of the early German Romanticism)

5- Butler, Marilyn.Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries. English literature and its background

1760-1830. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981. Introduction.

6- Stevens, David. Op Cit. (Honour, Hugh inRomanticism, 1991)

7- Shelley Byshe Percy.A defense of poetry. Downloaded from:

http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html. February 25th, 2008

8- Gaull, Marilyn.English Romanticism - The Human Context. New York, W W Norton and

Company, 1988.

9- Blake, William. The Little Black Boy. (In Stevens David, Op. Cit.)

10- Butler, Marilyn. Op. Cit.

11- Blake, William inRomanticism, Stevens, David. Op Cit.

12- Blake, William in Hutchings, Kevin. William Blake and the music of the songs.

Romanticism on the net: www.ron.umontreal.ca. Downloaded on 10/02/2008.

13- Cunningham, Allan in Hutchings, Kevin., Op Cit.

14- Blake, William. Auguries of Innocence. Downloaded from:

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/368.html. Downloaded on February 25th, 2008

15- Schiller, Friedrich in Stevens, David, Op Cit.

16- Keith Sagar 2002. Reading Blake. Downloaded from: Romanticism on the net

www.ron.umontreal.ca. Downloaded on 10/02/2008.

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17- Saklofske, John. Conscripting Imagination: The National Duty of William Blakes Art.

Downloaded from: Romanticism on the net www.ron.umontreal.ca Downloaded on 10/02/2008.

18- Rousseau, Jean Jacques. He was a philosopher whose political philosophy influenced the

French Revolution and the growth of rationalism.

19- The ideas in this paragraph are based on Stevens, David. Op Cit.

20- Blake, William. The Garden Of Love. Wordsworth, Jonathan and Jessica. The Penguin

Book of Romantic Poetry. London, Penguin Books, 2001.

I went to the Garden of Love

And saw what I never had seen

A chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green

And the gates of this Chapel were shut

And Thou shalt not. Writ over the door

So I turnd to the Garden of Love

That so many sweet flowers bore

And I saw it was filled with gravesAnd tomb-stones where flowers should be

And Priests in black gowns, wee walking their rounds

And binding with briars, my joys and desires

21- Keith Sagar 2002. Reading Blake: The Clod and the Pebble, The Sick Rose, The

Tyger Downloaded from: Romanticism on the net www.ron.umontreal.ca Downloaded on

10/02/2008.

22- Blake, William. The Lamb. Wordsworth, Jonathan and Jessica. Op Cit.

Little lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Gave thee life and bid thee feed

By the stream and oer the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight,

Softest clothing wooly bright;

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Gave thee such a tender voice

Making all the vales rejoice!

Little lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Little lamb I tell thee,

Little lamb I tell thee!

He is called by thy name,

For he calls himself a lamb;

He is meek and he is mild

He became a little child;

I a child and thou a lamb

We are called by his name

Little lamb God bless thee.

Little lamb God bless thee.

23- Blake, William. The Tyger. Wordsworth, Jonathan and Jessica. Op Cit.

Tyger, tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when they heart began to beat,

What dread hand? And what dread feet?

What the hammer? What the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? What dread grasp,

Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears

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And waterd heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Tyger tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

24- Naranjo, Claudio in Keith Sagar 2002.Reading Blake: The Clod and the Pebble,

The Sick Rose, The Tyger. (Claudio Naranjo is a Chilean-born anthropologist and

psychiatrist who is noted for his inter-disciplinary work with mind-altering substances as well as

the Enneagram of Personality and Gestalt psychotherapy)

25- Keith Sagar, Op Cit.

26- Blake, William. The Sick Rose. Wordsworth, Jonathan and Jessica. Op Cit.

27- Brown, David in Stevens, David Op Cit.

Notes to the Illustrations:

Page 1 - The Bard by John Martin (a romantic vision of a single Welsh bard escaping a

massacre ordered by Edward I of England). Downloaded from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:The_Bard.jpg February 10th, 2008

Page 2 The fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up (1839) J. M.

W. Turner. Downloaded from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ February 10th, 2008

Page 10 Blake, William.Introduction to Songs of Innocence and Experience. Downloaded

from:www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/soi.jpg.February 10th, 2008

Page 12 Blake William. Songs of Innocence and Experience . The Garden of Love.

Downloaded from:www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/garden/garden.jpg. February, 10th, 2008

20
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Martin_(painter)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_I_of_Englandhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:The_Bard.jpghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Temeraire_(1798)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/soi.jpghttp://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/garden/garden.jpghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Martin_(painter)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_I_of_Englandhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:The_Bard.jpghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Temeraire_(1798)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/soi.jpghttp://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/garden/garden.jpg


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Page 15 Blake William. Songs of Innocence and Experience. The Sick Rose. Downloaded

from:www.nwe.ufl.edu/.../ENL2022/BlakeSickRose1.jpg. February, 10th, 2008

Bibliography

Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. England, Penguin Reference Books,

1999.

Stevens, David.Romanticism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004

Butler, Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries. English literature and its background

1760-1830. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981

Gaull, Marilyn. English Romanticism - The Human Context. New York, W W Norton and

Company, 1988

Hutchings, Kevin. William Blake and the music of the songs. Romanticism on the net:

www.ron.umontreal.ca. Downloaded on 10/02/2008.

Keith Sagar 2002.Innocence and Experience in the Works of William Blake. Downloaded from:

Romanticism on the net www.ron.umontreal.ca. Downloaded on 10/02/2008.

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http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/.../ENL2022/BlakeSickRose1.jpghttp://www.ron.umontreal.ca/http://www.ron.umontreal.ca/http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/.../ENL2022/BlakeSickRose1.jpghttp://www.ron.umontreal.ca/http://www.ron.umontreal.ca/


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Saklofske, John. Conscripting Imagination: The National Duty of William Blakes Art.

Downloaded from: Romanticism on the net www.ron.umontreal.ca Downloaded on 10/02/2008

Wordsworth, Jonathan and Jessica. The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry. London, Penguin

Books, 2001.

Keith Sagar 2002.Reading Blake: The Clod and the Pebble, The Sick Rose, The Tyger

Downloaded from: Romanticism on the net www.ron.umontreal.ca Downloaded on

10/02/2008

Hauser, Arnold. The Social History of Art. Volume II. London, Routledge, 2002

Paz, Mario.La Literatura Inglesa Del Romanticismo al Siglo XX. Editorial Losada. Chapter 2:

Perodo Etico del Romanticismo (1798 1832)

Burgess, Anthony.Literatura Inglesa. Alahambra University. Chapter 17: Los Romnticos.
http://www.ron.umontreal.ca/http://www.ron.umontreal.ca/http://www.ron.umontreal.ca/http://www.ron.umontreal.ca/

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