Songs of innocence and songs of experience, by William Blake
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Songs of innocence and songs of experience, by William Blake
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Songs of Innocence and of Experience is an illustrated collection of poems by William Blake. It appeared in two phases. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William Blake himself in 1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. "Innocence" and "Experience" are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton's existential-mythic states of "Paradise" and the "Fall." Blake's categories are modes of perception that tend to coordinate with a chronology that would become standard in Romanticism: childhood is a state of protected innocence rather than original sin, but not immune to the fallen world and its institutions. This world sometimes impinges on childhood itself, and in any event becomes known through "experience," a state of being marked by the loss of childhood vitality, by fear and inhibition, by social and political corruption, and by the manifold oppression of Church, State, and the ruling classes. The volume's "Contrary States" are sometimes signalled by patently repeated or contrasted titles: in Innocence, Infant Joy, in Experience, Infant Sorrow; in Innocence, The Lamb, in Experience, The Fly and The Tyger. The stark simplicity of poems such as The Chimney Sweeper and The Little Black Boy display Blake's acute sensibility to the realities of poverty and exploitation that accompanied the "Dark Satanic Mills" of the Industrial Revolution.
Songs of innocence and songs of experience, by William Blake - Amazon Sales Rank: #7041438 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .13" w x 6.00" l, .19 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 56 pages
Songs of innocence and songs of experience, by William Blake About the Author William Blake (1757–1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry has led one British art journalist to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself". Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterized as part of both the Romantic movement and "Pre-Romantic", for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England, Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th century scholar William Rossetti characterised Blake as a "glorious luminary," and as "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors." Historian Peter Marshall has classified Blake as one of the forerunners of modern anarchism, along with Blake's contemporary William Godwin.
From AudioFile Both the student and connoisseur of the classics will enjoy this series of inexpensive audiobooks, each of which includes a Dover-Thrift edition of the text. The newcomer to classic poetry and prose, in particular, may experience in their spoken form an awakening to the beauty and power of these literary masters. It's hard to imagine a better introduction to William Blake's poetry than stage actors Brian Murray's and Suzanne Toren's audio rendition of SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE. Their alternating readings of Songs of Innocence vibrate with the reverence of Blake's vision of childhood as paradise lost; in Songs of Experience one fully senses Blake's later disillusion. The two books provide counterpoint to each other, an effect enhanced by the use of male and female readers. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
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Most helpful customer reviews
38 of 39 people found the following review helpful. This book is not the book the other reviewers are talking about By Soski Other Amazon users may be familiar with the Amazon.com practice of posting the Editorial reviews from a SIMILAR product and adding marginal and easy-to-overlook footnotes stating that the posted reviews actually refer to an "alternate paperback edition." I was not aware of the practice before purchasing this book, but aside from that there is no twin footnote floating around the section below the Editorials to tell you that the reviews provided are from a different book as well, nor can you see what book is ACTUALLY being reviewed unless you leave the book's page and go to See All. Most of the reviews are for this book:Songs of Innocence and Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, 1789-1794 (Worlds Classics) [Paperback] William Blake (Author, Illustrator), Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Introduction) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0192810898/ref=dp_proddesc_2?ie=UTF8&n=283155Why post reviews of a book that the reviews are not for, on its own page? That is not only confusing, but misleading. The book I bought and received is the one with a portrait of Blake on the cover, and its ISBN is 97816119492998--which is not the ISBN posted in Amazon.com's section, as of June 1, 2012. Amazon lists it as xxxxxxxxxx2997.There are NO illustrations in this edition. In fact, there isn't any publisher information beyond "Printed in the USA" on the bottom of the first page after the cover. I have not read this book, and am not familiar enough with Blake's work to be able to determine off the cuff if there are any errors or typos. I am assuming that if you only want the poetry of Songs of Innocence and Experience, than it is probably fine--and yes, most likely free of errors/typos. But this book is not an Oxford or any other dependably high-quality published edition. Most importantly, it is not the book that other customers reviewed, it is not a very high-quality or compelling edition in general, and it has no illustration plates. Do not buy this edition if you are a bibliophile looking for a beautiful and collectible book and/or you really want to experience the work of William Blake as it is meant to be experienced--that is, with his illustrations.
31 of 33 people found the following review helpful. The Human Abstract in Mystical Form By George Schaefer William Blake is one of the giants of poetry. He is often overlooked because of the obliqueness of many of his poems. But this affordable (read: cheap) collection of poems is well worth the price of admission. Most of Blakes most famous and well loved poems are included in this volume. Most of us had to read at least a couple of these poems in school. The Tyger still stands as one of the great poems of the English language. The Fly, The Lamb, Children of a Future Age, London and Ah, Sunflower are all included here. These are some of the most beautiful poems ever written. Even if you struggle to understand the meaning, the sheer beauty and music of the verses can still carry you away. Anyone interested in poetry needs to read these poems. It is among the best ever written.
28 of 30 people found the following review helpful. Not for the tone deaf By Giuseppe C. To begin with, it can be helpful to distinguish between "aesthetic" worldly poets/musicians and "vatic"/prophetic artists. Keats and Shakespeare, Ellington and Bill Evans belong in the first category; Shelley and Milton (and, of course, Dante) along with John Coltrane and Sun Ra belong in the second.Blake is the foremost representative of the latter group--the bards (Milton was his hero; America's Ezra Pound his foremost descendant). Of all the so-called "Romantic" poets, he is in many respects the most atypical. Time, its passing, its presence as "personal memory," specific referents to particular places, the fleshing-out of human figures, whether upper or lower class--all this is of little interest to the visionary prophet written off as "crazy" during his life-time, eventually canonized by the Beatniks in the 1950s, and finally admitted to respectable academia. Earthly phenomena are of little interest to him because, frankly, they have no status in reality. I deliberately steer students away from his graphic art, because its symbolic nature is poorly understood by a generation brought up on images that glorify the material world (if the emphasis isn't on the "real," it's on the surreal or "hyper-real"--but the real with which today's readers identify is anything but the spiritual cosmos that Blake finds everywhere, whether a tiger or a grain of sand. (Pity his wife, who understandably had little patience with him.) More often than not, Blake's pictures nowadays detract from, rather than support, the poetry. When Blake said, "the eye can see more than the heart can know," he envisioned a human potential which few are able to realize--the sort of epiphany granted to the prophet who, after a lifetime of struggle, sees the New Jerusalem or, like Dante, the Godhead itself (the spinning wheel at the end of The Paradiso).Blake's poetry, in both the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, is music that, even when tranquil and serene on the surface, is never resolved in its minor modalities and dissonant counter-themes. In the second set of poems, that verbal music rises to a deafening fortissimo in the poem "London," in which the speaker, above all, "hears" in every cry--from the infant's to the prostitute's to the numerous thralls of the church, state and crown--a threnody of pain and suffering that climaxes in an uproar of righteous anger and indignation at the horrible realization of the consequences of "mind-forged manacles" upon the world and its inhabitants. But even in the poems from the early collection, the tone is characterized by ever-present irony--the disjuncture between the voice of the innocent child and that of the poet who knows all too well what is in store, or the disparity between the trusting faith of the child and the selfish scenarios of the "wise" keepers--the grey-haired beadles--who will violate that trust with their well-laid plans. Blake's message is unceasingly twofold--first, a testament to the holy birthright of the human child and, second, withering criticism of the "rational engines" of society that will act to estrange the child from the Father, from the Son, from its own spiritual identity.Each of the poems may be read simply, but make no mistake about it: each is ironic and complex, inexhaustibly so. The reader must, with each passing word, be attuned, above all, to irony, ambiguity, and radical shifts in tone--or risk inflicting upon the poet the same distortions the poet finds in human society. The "enemy" is not the "Tiger" which, like the Lamb, is merely evidence of Divine Mystery and Power--but of another order. For Blake, the Lamb, the Tiger, the babe--and a poisonous reptile or virus--are created by God and are equally holy. And now the true antagonist makes its appearance: human reason and its institutions--climaxing in the state-sanctioned marriage of children and parents to the "bridegroom" of organized government and religion.It can be discouraging to read these poems with students and discover, practically without fail, that a large majority will misinterpret them, frequently coming to conclusions opposite to the evidence of the poems individually as well as collectively. The reasons are at least three-fold: fast and careless readings of short poems that often require (and deserve) the amount of time devoted to a novel; imposition of one's own belief system (or instilled principles and conventional aphorisms); the sheer challenge offered by Blake's "radical" ideas and their deceptive expression.Those who are serious about poetry and Blake will no doubt soon infer his "message": we must see not with the eye of reason, which measures and "charters" the flowing Thames as readily as it maps out the dehumanizing streets of London, but with the imagination, with the symbolic faculty that enables us to see the underlying spiritual basis of all material reality and thus to empathize with all living things and to live in harmony only with what is alive and vital. Blake is the first thinker I'm familiar with who puts the child first and foremost--and not until the early 19th century. For the Age of Enlightenment (The Age of Reason), children simply don't count. They have no individualism, no identity, no status in art and literature. In his own time, children were little more than the utilitarian objects of the Church-State, deployed to sweep chimneys, then disposed of. The dying chimney sweep of the first "Chimney Sweeper" poem (how regrettable that many readers do not even understand that little Tommy Dacer's "awakening" at the end of the poem is possible only because of his "murder" by the church) is, in the 2nd poem of the same title, a dead child, whose excoriating criticism includes his parents but is leveled primarily at the church. Some readers dismiss the second poem because it doesn't make sense to have a dead child lying in the snow and speaking--it's not rational.But that's to place ourselves at the mercy of the poems' judgments--as misguided tools of Reason, deaf to the harmonious world and the discordant society around us. If it helps to postpone taking on some of the more difficult poems in either collection, fine. But each poem, each ironic line and musical phrase, each word and note of sorrow or joy is integral with the whole, each part absolutely and completely consistent with the overall theme, meaning and purpose. Seeing with the imagination requires practice and patience: reclaiming one's inner child (Wordsworth's "child-philosopher" who, trailing clouds of glory, is borne of another realm and place) is not a piece of cake. Neither is reading Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience.
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