Thus, Blake presents an explicit condemnation not only of organized religion, but specifically those religions which seek official legitimization and control over non-adherents; considering that the Church of England was (and is) the official religion of England, whose leader simultaneously serves as the head of state, Blake's condemnation of religions and religious adherents who presume to "[govern] the unwilling" must be recognized for the rebellious and almost revolutionary statement that it is.
Following from his clear disgust with religious piety that seeks to control human desire and potential, Blake provides a series of "Proverbs of Hell," and these proverbs present what are arguably Blake's most creative, incisive, and entertaining challenges to traditional interpretations of religion in general and Christianity in particular. Examining some of these proverbs in detail will serve to expand one's understanding of Blake's particular moral or ethical position, which stands in opposition to the moral dictates of…...
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Works Cited
Bentley, G.E. William Blake: The Critical Heritage. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2002.
Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. London: Florence Press, 1911.
Gilpin, George H. "William Blake and the Worlds Body of Science." Studies in Romanticism
William Blake's "The Lamb" is part of his manuscript for Songs of Innocence (Erdman, 1988, p. 72). As such, there is a light, jubilant tone rendered throughout, which pervades the poem's theme, subject, narrator, and setting. Within this poem, an unidentified narrator directly addresses a lamb. The principle motif that this work revolves about is the time honored conceit of a lamb representing Jesus Christ and the mercy and kindness of God himself. Therefore, this poem is principally about the goodness and divinity of all creatures as evinced by their innate connection towards God, and Blake utilizes various aspects of the poem's setting, mood, title, narrator, and literary devices to reinforce this principle theme.
Structurally, Blake divides the poem into a pair of stanzas, both of which use a copious amount of anaphora. The primary stanza is about the literal lamb whom the narrator is addressing; the second stanza is about…...
William Blake
Although he was misunderstood and underappreciated throughout his lifetime, William Blake and his work only truly became influential after his death in 1827 (William Blake, 2014). Although he is best known for his poetry, Blake also created a significant amount of art work and other publications throughout his life. Despite the fact that his work found no profound audience during his life, Williams Blake was nonetheless a visionary, whose work and life combined to make of him an interesting and important poet, even to this day, nearly two centuries after his death.
William Blake found his calling already at an early age. He was born on 28 November 1757 in Soho, London. From an early age, he reported seeing "visions," the first of which the one of the first was the "face of God" he reported to see at his window at the age of four. While his parents tried…...
William lake was born in London in 1757, the son of a hosier. He attended a drawing school and was subsequently apprenticed to an engraver from 1772-9, before attending the Royal Academy as a student from 1779 to 1780. During this time he made his living as an engraver, producing illustrations for the book trade, and was also composing and illustrating his own poetical works. He married Catherine oucher in 1782. His first published work was Poetical Sketches (1783), the appearance of which was funded by members of the intellectual circle of artistic and literary friends with which lake had become associated in the early 1780s. In 1784 lake established his own printing shop, which was commercially unsuccessful, failing in 1787. lake continued to earn a living by engraving for the commercial publishing market, but also worked on his own poems and engravings. In 1788 he conceived of combining poetical…...
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Bibliography
Bentley, G.E. (ed.) (1975). William Blake: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge.
Bottrall, M. (ed.) (1970). William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Bronowski, J. (1972). William Blake and the Age of Revolution. London: Routledge.
Erdman, D. (1977). Blake: Prophet Against Empire. New Haven, CT: Princeton University Press.
illiam Blake is usually classified with the Romantic movement in English literature -- which coalesced in the revolutionary climate of the late eighteenth century, and roughly spanned the period from 1780 to 1830. The Romantic movement spanned a time of enormous social change in Britain. Not only was this a period of time that witnessed revolutions in America (1776) and France (1789), Britain itself would have to subdue a rebellion in Ireland (1798) quickly followed by the imperial annexation of its neighboring island by parliamentary Act of Union. In the meantime, the religious life of Britain was still in an uproar, due to the disenfranchisement of both Roman Catholics and "dissenters" like Blake himself, who were attracted to fringe Protestant sects or creeds (such as Quakerism or Unitarianism) which were not in full doctrinal accord with the established church. But the social condition of Great Britain in this period was…...
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Works Cited
Aers, D. "William Blake and the Dialectics of Sex." English Literary History 44.3 (1977): 500-14. Print.
Blake, William. "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell."
Blake, William. The Book of Thel.
Blake, William. Visions of the Daughters of Albion.
William lake was never fully appreciated in his own time but is still an influence on literary, political and theological analyses long after his death. While the amount of modern literary criticism that now exists should hold testament to his importance, lake and his visions, pastoral-like settings and illuminated writings shaped the modern literary canon and paved the way for others. Specifically his works "The Divine Image," its companion poem "A Divine Image" and "The Human Abstract" cited within his collections Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) provide an open and continuous platform for interpretation and criticism.
William lake was born in 1757 in London to a family of meager means. As a boy, his parents enrolled him in a drawing school in 1768 but the family funds only enabled him to stay there for four years before he was to become an engraver's apprentice. He became a…...
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Bibliography:
Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Mineola: Dover, 1992.
-- . The Early Illuminated Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Diby, George. Symbol and Image in William Blake. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957.
Dorfman, Deborah. Blake in the Nineteenth Century: His Reputation as a Poet from Gilchrist to Yeats. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969.
"
ecause he believed that that creation followed a cosmic catastrophe and a fall of spiritual beings into matter, lake discusses Gnosticism, a multi-faceted religious movement that has run parallel to mainstream Christianity (Friedlander, 1999). Unlike most other Gnosticizers, lake sees the world as a wonderful place, but one that would ultimately give way to a restored universe. For lake, the purpose of creation is as a place for personal growth, in preparation for the beginning of our real lives. While the natural world contains much that is gentle and innocent ("Songs of Innocence"), those who are experienced with life ("Songs of Experience") understand that life can be terrible and frightening.
lake's poem, "The Tyger," which finishes without an answer, is basically about our own experience of not getting a completely satisfactory answer to the important question of faith. It is aklso about having our reason overwhelmed at once by the beauty…...
Blake, William. (1991). Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Ed. Andrew Lincoln. From Blake's Illuminated Books, Vol. 2, General Ed. David Bindman. Princeton: Princeton University Press and the William Blake Trust.
Blunt, Anthony. (1959). The Art of William Blake. New York: Columbia University Press.
illiam Blake was one of Britain's greatest poets. His long history of mental illness also makes him one of England's most colourful and interesting literary figures. He lived his life in poverty, in the company of his devoted wife, and created a great deal of controversy due to his unconventional views on religion and rationalism.
He was born on November 28, 1757 in London.
Blake's parents were James, a hosier, and Catherine. As was common at the time, two of his six siblings died as infants.
Blake had a long and consistent history of mental illness. As a child, he reported having visions. At the age of four, Blake said that God had put his head to the window, and he saw a tree filled with angels. He spoke often with the angel Gabriel, and the Virgin Mary, and often saw visions of ghosts and monks. Blake's parents tried to keep him from…...
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Works Cited
Bentley, G.E. The stranger from paradise: A biography of William Blake New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2001.
Vaughan, William. William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.
WILLIAM BLAKE'S MILTON-TANSFOMATION
The great omantic poet, William Blake, is known for his revolutionary ideas and his fiery attacks on everything he opposed. His work is usually not very complex in nature but since it is connected with the infinite and discusses some imaginary elements, one needs to read his poems more than once to make sense of them. This is exactly what is required when reading Blake's Milton, a poem that respectfully yet firmly attacks Miltonic Christianity of submission and service. It is important to read this poem in the light of Milton's actual philosophies and theology for only then can we understand what Blake was trying to say in his "visionary" poem Milton.
John Milton staunch Puritan and a supporter of the England Parliament firmly believed in serving the God but his images of the Creator and Satan have often come under severe criticism because of the beliefs on which…...
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References
Edward Robert Friedlander, M.D, WILLIAM BLAKE'S MILTON:
MEANING AND MADNESS, Department of English Literature, Brown University, 1973, revised 1986
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. (New York: Oxford UP, 1990 [1757]) pp. 63-4.
Thorpe, James, ed., Milton Criticism: Selections from Four Centuries, New York, 1950.
Apostrophe: Use of apostrophe directing speaker's prose to the tiger.
Metaphor: The tiger has "eyes of fire"
Anaphora: epetition of "What" at the beginning of sentences or clauses (What dread hand, what the chain, etc.)
Allusion: The immortal hand or eye (God or Satan, Creation or Destruction; Distant deeps or skies; the underworld, heaven.
The overall theme of the poem seems to be that the universe is in a continual process of creation/destruction/creation. Each is a necessary part, and really there is no good or bad about what happens in the natural world, because the natural world is amoral -- it simply is a system in which things must happen in a circular manner. The mood is both somber and stately, with the rhyme scheme propelling the reader through the prose with a lilt, one might even say…...
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REFERENCES and WORKS CONSULTED
Chesterton, G.K. (2005). William Blake. Cosimo Classics.
Damon, S. (1988). A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake.
Little Brown.
Frye, N. (1969). Fearful Symmetry -- a Study of William Blake. Princeton University
William Blake's "The Lamb"
In the poem "The Lamb," William Blake distinguishes his unique style through the incorporation of religious symbolism, creative lines, and simplistic patterns. "The Lamb" was published as part of a series of poems in 1789 titled the Songs of Innocence; actually, he wrote "The Lamb" and the other works as part of a series of lyrics. The entire work represents an enlightened state in Blake's life, and it was written before a contrary, darker state of mind in the 1793 sequel, the Songs of Experience. Blake was influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg, a writer who gave Christianity a mystical interpretation, and that influenced is found in Blake's work, like "The Lamb," poems that were more simplistic in style and nature before he became more contrition and prophetic in the Songs of Experience. Through simplistic structure, he chose the narrator of a child, as in this poem, told through…...
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References
Ackroyd, Peter. Blake: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet Against Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954.
Gardner, Stanley. Blake. New York: Arco Publishing Company, Inc., 1969.
Lister, Raymond. William Blake: An Introduction to The Man and to His Work. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1968.
He saw that there could be no innocence if one could not acquire experience and knowledge later. This is also true of the kind of art Blake executed. Engravings are drawings made up of lines. It is not possible to remove the lines and have any art left, because that is what his style art does: it divides blank space. Without the blank space, there can be no lines. Without the lines, there is no art. There is only a blank sheet.
Blake emphasizes the differences between his poems of innocence and poems of experience. Just as Blake could have painted in watercolors, with many colors, many shades, all running together, he could have imbued his poems with "shades of gray." When artists paint with colors, they don't use line. The line is implied as the rooftop meets the sky. But in Blake's etchings, the only way we would see…...
Blake instead chooses to call Him by the title which John the Baptist gave to him when he said, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world" (John 1:29), setting off a long tradition of Jesus being identified as the Lamb of God (Agnus Dei). The title has reverberated throughout the centuries, appearing in the Mass: "Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis," as well as in song.
Blake, here, uses the title to gain traction with the child. The child's Maker, he says, is like him: He, too, was once a child, and even goes by the same name as that which the speaker has given the child: "He is called by thy name, / For he calls himself a Lamb. / He is meek, and he is mild; / He became a little child." Blake's poem is a poem of the Incarnation:…...
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Works Cited
Blake, William. "The Lamb." Poetry Foundation. Web. 11 Oct 2011.
New Testament. NY: Confraternity of the Precious Blood, 1948. Print.
illiam Blake
Social Indictment and a Religious Vision of Salvation in illiam Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper"
ritten in 1789 and published in the collection, Songs of Innocence, illiam Blake's poem "The Chimney Sweeper," shows the cruel world of being a child in post-industrial London. The narrator of the poem is a chimney sweeper who was sold into the profession by his father, his mother having died when he was very young. Before he could even properly say the words, he was sent out onto the street to sell his services. hile this vision of childhood may be shocking to the modern reader, to the parents who made this difficult choice, it was better than seeing their children starve (Edmundson). He was so young that he "Could scarcely cry ' 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!," his young boy's lisp transforming the call for a "sweep!" into a lament. Throughout the poem, Blake incorporates differing…...
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Works Cited
Classics Network. "A Poison Tree, London, Chimney Sweeper Innocence):
1. First stanza: "Little Lamb, who made thee? / Dost thou know who made thee?"
IV. Body paragraph III: Contrast with Tyger
A. Ironically, the lion is "commonly known as the protector of the Lamb," (Damon & Eaves 242).
B. The lion is "often associated with the Tyger, for they are both forms of wrath: the lion is spiritual wrath, inspired by pity…while the Tyger's blind wrath is purely emotional," (all Damon & Eaves 242)
C. Although the motif of a lion laying down with the lamb does not actually occur in the Bible, the image has become part of common Christian consciousness and thus Blake does connect the Lion/Tyger with the Lamb in the Songs of Innocence and Experience.
V. Conclusion
A. Blake's poem "The Lamb" uses a tone of innocence to convey a central theme of innocence as a quality of Christ.
B. Christian symbolism pervades the poem, and also its counterpart "The Tyger."
C. Blake…...
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Works Cited
Blake, William. "The Lamb."
Damon, Samuel Foster and Eaves, Morris. A Blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of William Blake. Brown University, 1988.
Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, 1969.
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