Blake

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Blakes Songs of Innocence and Experience

• ENGL 203
• Dr. Fike

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Romantic Period 1798-1832

• 1798 WW and Col published Lyrical Ballads see
  WWs "Preface."
• A different kind of poetry poetry about common
  persons written in everyday language.
• Also, the supernatural.
• WWnatureColsupernatural.
• 1832 First Reform Bill, which made changes in
  the system of representation and voting rights
• Eliminated "rotten boroughs"depopulated areas
  whose seat in Commons was at the disposal of a
  nobleman.
• Redistributed parliamentary representation to
  include the new industrial cities.
• Extended the vote.

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More Dates

• 1765 James Watt invented the steam engine.
  Industrial Revolution begins. Extremes of rich
  and poor (cf. Blake).
• 1776 American Revolutions begins.
• 1789 July 14The storming of the Bastille
  start of French Revolution, 1789-1815 (sympathy
  with American and French Revolutions, optimism
  about positive social change, but later
  disappointment when the Fr. Rev. lapsed into
  anarchy and tyranny).
• 1789 Blake publishes Songs of Innocence
• 1794 Robespierre guillotined.
• 1794 Blakes's Songs of Innocence and Experience
  published.

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Two Generations of Romantic Poets

• First Generation
• Blake  1757-1827
• Wordsworth  1770-1850
• Coleridge  1772-1834

• Second Generation
• Byron  1788-1824
• Shelley  1792-1822
• Keats  1795-1821

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Ways of Categorizing the Romantic Poets

• Two generations, the second reacting to the
  first.
• Example Shelley was disappointed in WW
  thought WW had sold out and thought that WW's
  view of nature was naïve. See "To Wordsworth,"
  and "Alastor." WW had been a "lone star," but
  now he conforms to social norms.
• Cosmological model EarthBlake, WW, Col,
  Shelley, and KeatsByronmoon.
• Different schools
• Lake school WW, Coleridge
• Cockney school Keats (http//en.wikipedia.org/wi
  ki/Cockney_School)
• Satanic school Shelley and Blake
• (This obviously leaves out Byron.)

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Definition

• What IS Romanticism?
• Write for 1 minute about what you think it means.
• Discussion.

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Summary of Myths about Romanticism

• It is nature poetry in the conventional sense
  (pastoral poetry).
• Romantics are self-indulgent and sentimental.
• Romantics were escapists who took refuge in
  nature.
• Romantics were naïve or unlearned.
• Romantics were irrational
• Romanticism is an attack on or an escape from
  form.

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What Romanticism Is NOT

• Nature poetry in the conventional sense
  pastoralism. Example WW's Lucy and her nutting
  bag.
• POINT Romantic poetry portrays a dialectical
  relationship between nature and the poetic
  imagination. Examples
• Blake "Where man is not, nature is barren
  (MHH). Blake hated nature thought that it must
  be overcome if one is to live imaginatively.
• WW Mt. Snowdon is the "image of a mighty mind."
• Shelley Mt. Blanc, a symbol of nature at its
  highest, is nothing without the mind.

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What Romanticism Is NOT

• Romantics are self-indulgent and sentimental
  Shelley, "I fall upon the thorns of life, I
  bleed (Ode to the West Wind).
• POINT Romantics dramatize the self the "I" is
  rarely the poet himself.
• Example Shelley in "Alastor" creates a speaker
  who is incorrect.
• Author isn't always equal to speaker. Persona.

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What Romanticism Is NOT

• Romantics were escapists who took refuge in
  nature.
• POINT It is wrong to say that the Romantic
  poets were escapists. Quite the contrary.
• Blake expresses great concern about social
  conditions.
• WW comes down from Mt. Snowdon at the end of The
  Prelude after having a transcendent experience,
  he affirms human community.
• Byron fought and died in Greece's war for
  independence against Turkey (1824).
• Shelley's Defense is about the importance of the
  poet's engagement in human community stresses
  the importance of love ("the great secret of
  morals") and declares that poets are the
  unacknowledged legislators of the world.

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What Romanticism Is NOT

• Romantics were naïve and unlearned.
• POINT To say that the Romantic poets were naïve
  and unlearned is false.
• Shelley was actually a better classical scholar
  than Dryden.
• Coleridge said that poetry has a logic of its
  own like science but more complex.
• Col was himself as great a critic as Dr. Johnson.
• Keats is an interesting exception in "Chapman's
  Homer" he stakes a poetic claim despite the
  absence of classical training (i.e., he was
  reading a translation, not the original Greek
  version).

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What Romanticism Is NOT

• Romantics were irrational.
• They did recognize the claims of the irrational,
  but with a twist. Wordsworth claimed that
  imagination was "Reason in her most exalted mood"
  (Prelude 14.188-92).
• Romantics took a broad view of the psyche, but
  they hardly worshipped irrationality.

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What Romanticism Is NOT

• Romanticism is an attack on or an escape from
  form.
• Definition of "form" rhyme scheme, meter,
  stanza structure.
• Romantic poets were actually interested in
  creating new forms Blake and Wordsworth created
  new forms of the epic.
• Romantics resurrected an old form the sonnet.
• Keats used the Spenserian stanza (ababbcbcc).
• Romantic poets used form in the line iambic
  pentameter in much of WW vs. the free verse of
  the 20th C.
• POINT The invention and recreation of new forms.

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Summary of Romanticisms Actual Characteristics

• Romanticism stresses the mind's dialectical
  relationship to nature. Nature activates the
  imagination.
• Imagination is the supreme organizing and
  unifying power. Imagination in turn colors
  nature.
• A poetry focusing on the role of the poet and of
  poetry in society poetry of social engagement.

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What Romanticism IS

• Romanticism stresses the mind's dialectical
  relationship to nature (a) it is used to define
  the poet's ego, and (b) Rom poetry is about how
  the mind shapes perception. Examples
• Blake explored the "fearful symmetry" of his own
  mind. How a forest figures forth the night of
  the mind. He also said, Where man is not,
  nature is barren.
• WW told the story of his own mind's growth in
  an epic poem poetry about the making of poetry
  and about the interaction of mind and nature.
• WW "the Mind of Man" is "my haunt, and the main
  region of my song"Prospectus to The Recluse.
• POINT The poetry emphasizes the acts of mind of
  the speakers/poets, especially with respect to
  their relationship with nature.

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What Romanticism IS

• Imagination is the supreme organizing and
  unifying power "For the romantic poets,
  imagination was a supreme organizing and unifying
  power it went beyond merely recording and
  rearranging sense data to create both itself and
  the world that an individual could know" (Adams
  363).
• 18Creasonmirror19Cimaginationlamp.
• The essential source for this homology is M.H.
  Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp.

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What Romanticism IS

• A poetry focusing on the role of the poet and of
  poetry in society.
• Opposition to the status quo.
• The poet becomes a prophet addressing individuals
  and society, and the poetic act becomes a
  metaphor for any imaginative act in society at
  large. Shelley's Defense any act of creation
  is poetry.
• So the poetic act is a metaphor for any
  imaginative act in society at large.
• Goal was unity of individual and society.
• Imagination is the agency of this unity.

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18th Century vs. Romantic Period

• 18th Century
• Reason
• Mirror
• Source M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp

• Romanticism
• Imagination
• Lamp

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Clarification

• The eye/brain is not a faithful camera, but
  tinkers with the world before it gives it to us.
• --Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe, p.
  163
• Wordsworth, Preface, page 597 What
  distinguishes the poems in Lyrical Ballads from
  others is that the feeling therein developed
  gives importance to the action and situation, and
  not the action and situation to the feeling.

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Exercise

• http//faculty.winthrop.edu/fikem/Courses/ENGL202
  03/20320Three20Key20Passages.htm
• Match these passages to the 18th or 19th century
  and be able to defend your choice.

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Answers

• Rasselas Interest in characteristics of a
  general type, rather than in individual
  deviations from type emphasis on universals art
  should portray things as they ought to be, not as
  they sometimes are in actual life. Think of art
  as a mirror. 18th century.
• Coopers Hill The poet wants to model his
  poetry on a river, so that poetry not only
  describes the river accurately and prescriptively
  (ideal conditions) but also takes on the rivers
  essential characteristics clarity in depth,
  gentleness in excitement, strength without rage.
  In other words, the lines celebrate a mean
  between extremes. The mean is a neoclassical
  ideal precisely what Denham, though he wrote in
  the 17th century, expresses. Restraint vs.
  Elizabethan excesses. 18th century.
• Tintern Abbey The minds relationship to
  nature and the role of the imagination in
  creating the world around us the mind does not
  just receive sensory data it also plays a key
  role in creating the surrounding world. Mirror
  (Johnson Denham) vs. lamp (WW). Positive
  attitude toward nature nature as a quasi-divine
  ministering presence vs. what we will see in
  Blake. Romantic period.

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Blakes Main Ideas

• Reality is ultimately mental or spiritual.
• All existence derives from an infinite divine
  spirit that exists outside of space and time.
• The divine spark in each of us is the Real Man or
  imaginative part of the self.
• Christ the poetic genius in each person.
• What are expressions of the divine in us?  See
  The Divine Image Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
  / Is God our father dear.
• Bad things happen when human virtues are cut off
  from their divine source sadism, cruelty, war,
  hatred, deceit.

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Summary

• You have a divine spark inside you to affirm it
  is to live imaginatively and to embrace virtues
  to separate yourself from your own true nature,
  which participates in the divine, is to embrace
  spiritual death.

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Alternatives

• Divine spark ? live imaginatively ? embrace
  virtue
• OR
• Divine spark ? separate from it ? vice, spiritual
  death

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Blake Goes Further Main Ideas Continued

• The soul exists prior to birth, and birth is the
  souls descent into the body. It moves from
  heaven (eternal day) to the wilderness of this
  world. That is why nature is bad. See The Book
  of Thel.
• See example  "Little Black Boy"
• Boy is born into nature (the southern wild, My
  mother taught me underneath a tree, grove).
  Other associations darkness, blackness
• Vs. heaven, a realm of light (Look on the rising
  sun there God does live)
• See Plate 9 darkness and shadow of the earthly
  state vs. the light of the rising sun.
• Sun/son East the direction of Jerusalem.

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Key Term Contraries

• MHH, page 35, plate 3 Without Contraries is no
  progression. These are not mere opposites (they
  are not negationsopposites that do not struggle
  with each other) but opposites that interact with
  each other, opposites locked in struggle, which
  results in progress.
• Subtitle Songs of Innocence and Experience
  Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human
  Soul.
• Innocence and Experience satirize each other
  Experience exposes the precarious unreality of
  Innocence Innocence censures the duplicity of
  Experiences realities (Bloom 34).
• You cannot have one without the other.
• Other examples
• The Human Abstract, page 27 care and cruelty
• MHH, page 37, plate 8, line 1 Prisons are
  built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of
  Religion.

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The Garden of Eden

• See 1 on handout Adam and Eve are being
  expelled from the Garden. Notice the subtitle.
• See 2 on handout Children with a nurse under a
  tree (probably an apple tree) this suggests the
  fall to which all persons are heir.
• For Blake, the following events are parallel
  because all three involve spiritual diminution,
  meaning that the divine spirit becomes remote,
  and the material world seems to be the real
  world
• Creation
• The fall of Adam and Eve
• The descent of the soul into the body

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Images

• General title page http//www.blakearchive.org/e
  xist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectidsongsie.b.il
  lbk.01javayes
• Frontispiece to Songs of Innocence
  http//www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/ob
  ject.xq?objectidsongsie.b.illbk.02javayes
• Title page from Songs of Innocence
  http//www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/ob
  ject.xq?objectidsongsie.b.illbk.03javayes
• The Lamb http//www.blakearchive.org/exist/bla
  ke/archive/object.xq?objectidsongsie.b.illbk.16j
  avayes
• Frontispiece from Songs of Experience
  http//www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/ob
  ject.xq?objectidsongsie.b.illbk.29javayes
• Title page from Songs of Experience
  http//www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/ob
  ject.xq?objectidsongsie.b.illbk.30javayes

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Sacred History Parallels Individual Experience

• Paradiseinnocence contraries are not
  perceived, and you lack awareness of sin and
  death.
• Fallexperience contraries are perceived you
  know suffering and hate your oppressors you get
  stuck in the mire of earthly existence. You know
  good by knowing evil. Death is realized See 4
  on the handout (see next slide).
• Paradise regainedorganized innocence
  contraries are perceived you are aware of but
  not overcome by life in the world. Happy people
  whose experience does not merit happiness enjoy
  organized innocence.

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Analogy

• Innocence When youre a really little kid, you
  think that your parents have no faults.
• Experience When you get a bit older, your
  realization of your parents faults outweighs
  their positive characteristics.
• Organized innocence When you get older still,
  you gain a better perspective and learn to
  appreciate your parents good points in spite of
  their shortcomings.

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John Keats Negative Capability

• Page 768 Negative Capability, that is when man
  is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries,
  doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact
  reason.
• POINT Negative capability is somewhat parallel
  to organized innocence.

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Summary

• Pre-existence of the soul ? birth/descent into
  the wilderness of this world ? innocence ?
  experience ? organized innocence ? return to the
  spirit world.
• POINT Innocence and experience are not static
  states you move from one to another and if you
  are lucky, you move to a higher state of
  organized innocence.
• POINT Organized innocence is very much like our
  concept felix culpa, the fortunate fall the
  fall enables a rise. As in sacred history, so in
  individual experience Romantic poets like to
  secularize the sacred.

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Example of Such Secularizing

• Luke 1720 The kingdom of God is within
  you.
• Blake on page 39, plate 11 All deities reside
  in the human breast.
• The catch is that all demons reside there also.

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Examples of Movement between States Innocence ?
Experience

• Introduction to Songs of Innocence
• Introduction to Songs of Experience
• Earths Answer
• The Sick Rose
• To Tirzah
• London (write a response paper about this poem)

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Introduction to Songs of Innocence

• Piper vs. bard.
• Shape of a poets life pastoral ? epic.
• Things suggesting movement out of innocence
  wept, staind.
• POINT Innocence is a transient state. One must
  move out of it into the realm of experience.
• See 3 on handout the vine makes the plate look
  like a tombstone. One must leave the state on
  innocence and enter the world of experience where
  death is realized.

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Introduction to Songs of Experience

• How is this poem different?
• Answer Whereas the piper implies that innocence
  must yield to experience, the bard calls to the
  fallen world of experience to renew itself and
  achieve a state of organized innocence.
• Note Put quotation marks around the last two
  stanzas the bard speaks here. It may also help
  you to put a comma between fallen and fallen
  in line 10.

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Earths Answer

• This poem identifies the problem of sexual
  jealousy. Healthy sexuality and darkness are
  incompatible.
• Stanzas 2-5 are spoken by Earth.
• Touch is important in Blakes poetry.
• Proper sexual relations, he suggests, are not
  dark and secret.

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The Sick Rose

• The Sick Rose is an example of problematic
  sexualitya poem about rape-marriage, VD, the
  absence of bright, open love.

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To Tirzah

• This poem identifies imagination and touch as the
  keys to transcending fallen perception.
• Positive marriage, Jerusalem, imagination (next
  slide), and touch
• Negative whoring (cf. London), Tirzah,
  nature, and legalism
• The speaker steps back from the fallen world of
  experience and repudiates the Mother of my
  Mortal part.
• The death of Jesus set me free i.e., free
  from bondage to nature. In other words, Tirzah
  parallels natural bondage.
• Life in the spirit ? innocence ? experience ?
  organized innocence ? life in the spirit.
• Again, see 4 on handout. Also see the original
  of To Tirzah, which shows a guy dying, and the
  caption reads It is raised a spiritual body.

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Cleansing the doors of perception

• MHH, page 40, page 14 If the doors of
  perception were cleansed every thing would appear
  to man as it is, infinite.
• POINT This should be the goal of our
  intellectual/spiritual endeavors. Blake is
  getting at the need not just to see things but to
  see through them to their significance.

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Blakes London
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Response Paper Topic London

• What things in the first two stanzas suggest
  restriction or control?
• What things relate to blackness?
• What do blast and blight mean? What
  parallels are there? Why hearse?
• What role does prostitution play in this poem?
• How are contraries at work in this poem?
• What is the moral of the poem?
• END