Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (Dover Thrift Editions) [Paperback]

William Blake (Author)

Book Description

Series: Dover Thrift Editions | Publication Date: February 5, 1992

Two classics of English poetry, alternately describing childhood states of innocence and their inevitable corruption by a harsh and unjust world. Contains the full texts of all the poems in the original 1794 edition of both collections. Alphabetical lists of titles and first lines. Publisher's Note.

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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. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 14 and up
  
• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Dover Publications (February 5, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0486270513
• ISBN-13: 978-0486270517
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #49,658 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #11 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Single Authors > British & Irish
  • #20 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > General

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25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Human Abstract in Mystical Form, March 15, 2000

By 

George Schaefer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (Dover Thrift Editions) (Paperback)

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.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not for the tone deaf, June 9, 2009

By 

Samuel Chell (Kenosha,, WI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (Paperback)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Artful simplicity as poetic greatness, April 28, 2005

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (Dover Thrift Editions) (Paperback)

Blake is the master of the simple childlike deep and meaningful line. "Little Lamb , who made thee dost thou know who made thee" The lines of the first book are of innocence, before knowledge and experience have complicated the soul. The lines of the 'Songs of Experience" are of a more problematic reality. "Tiger Tiger burning bright in the forest of the night/ What immortal hand or eye/ Dare frame thy fearful symmetry/?
Blake is a thinker with an ideology, a revolutionary but I think his greatest value is not in the political or even metaphysical ideas but rather in the psychological apprehension in lines of beauty. Blake understands that wrath held within it will grow, but spoken wrath may go- he understands that the road to hell may be paved with good intentions. His proverbial quality is in this simple , or seemingly simple poetry too , and he is telling us about life and soul while uplifting us with lines which ring and remain in the mind.
These poems are Blake at his most accessible and memorable, whatever literary critics may say about the longer epic poems. These are the poems which have meant and will mean much to mankind. And they can be read with pleasure and puzzlement, over and over again.