Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience

1. Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience ENGL 203 Dr. Fike

2. Romantic Period: 1798-1832 • 1798: WW and Col published Lyrical Ballads; see WW’s "Preface." • A different kind of poetry: poetry about common persons written in everyday language. • Also, the supernatural. • WW:nature::Col:supernatural. • 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.

3. 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 14—The 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.

4. First Generation Blake:  1757-1827 Wordsworth:  1770-1850 Coleridge:  1772-1834 Second Generation Byron:  1788-1824 Shelley:  1792-1822 Keats:  1795-1821 Two Generations of Romantic Poets

5. 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: Earth:Blake, WW, Col, Shelley, and Keats::Byron:moon. • Different schools: • Lake school: WW, Coleridge • Cockney school: Keats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockney_School) • Satanic school: Shelley and Blake (This obviously leaves out Byron.)

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

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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 “[p]oets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

11. 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).

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. Summary of Romanticism’s 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.

15. 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.

16. 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). • 18C:reason:mirror::19C:imagination:lamp. • The essential source for this homology is M.H. Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp.

17. 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.

18. 18th Century Reason Mirror Source: M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp Romanticism Imagination Lamp 18th Century vs. Romantic Period

19. 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.”

20. Exercise • http://faculty.winthrop.edu/fikem/Courses/ENGL%20203/203%20Three%20Key%20Passages.htm • Match these passages to the 18th or 19th century and be able to defend your choice.

21. 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. • “Cooper’s 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 river’s 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 mind’s 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.

22. Blake’s 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.

23. 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.

24. Alternatives Divine spark  live imaginatively  embrace virtue OR Divine spark  separate from it  vice, spiritual death

25. Blake Goes Further: Main Ideas Continued • The soul exists prior to birth, and birth is the soul’s 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.

26. Key Term: Contraries • MHH, page 35, plate 3: “Without Contraries is no progression.” These are not mere opposites (they are not negations—opposites 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 Experience’s 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.”

27. 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

28. Images • General title page: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=songsie.b.illbk.01&java=yes • Frontispiece to Songs of Innocence: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=songsie.b.illbk.02&java=yes • Title page from Songs of Innocence: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=songsie.b.illbk.03&java=yes • “The Lamb”: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=songsie.b.illbk.16&java=yes • Frontispiece from Songs of Experience: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=songsie.b.illbk.29&java=yes • Title page from Songs of Experience: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=songsie.b.illbk.30&java=yes

29. Sacred History Parallels Individual Experience • Paradise:innocence: contraries are not perceived, and you lack awareness of sin and death. • Fall:experience: 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 regained:organized 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.

30. Analogy • Innocence: When you’re 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.

31. 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.

32. 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.

33. Example of Such Secularizing • Luke 17:20: “‘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.

34. Examples of Movement between States: Innocence  Experience • “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence • “Introduction” to Songs of Experience • “Earth’s Answer” • “The Sick Rose” • “To Tirzah” • “London” (write a response paper about this poem)

35. “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence • Piper vs. bard. • Shape of a poet’s life: pastoral  epic. • Things suggesting movement out of innocence: “wept,” “stain’d.” • 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.

36. “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.

37. “Earth’s 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 Blake’s poetry. • Proper sexual relations, he suggests, are not dark and secret.

38. “The Sick Rose” • “The Sick Rose” is an example of problematic sexuality—a poem about rape-marriage, VD, the absence of bright, open love.

39. “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.”

40. 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.

41. Blake’s “London”

42. 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