Blake critical quotes

• DW. Harding

  'In Infant Sorrow there is a perpetual cycle of conflict between the old and the young'
• DW. Harding

  'He explored the relationships between the perfect possibilities he felt in human life and the confusions and imperfections in actual experience'
• B. Ifor Evans

  'One poet rose against all the pressures of the material world with a divine frenzy of vision and prophecy'
• B. Ifor Evans

  'Wisdom speaks with the voice of a child'
• J. Bronowski

  'Blake's poetry speaks from one age to another because it is founded in experiences which are simple, common and profound'
• Raymond Williams

  'Part of a group of poets who see themselves as agents of the revolution of life'
• Legouis and Cazamician

  'Blake upsets all settled criteria and faiths, whether it be the orthodox religion of Christ or the traditional notion of good and evil'
• Peter Ackroyd

  'Sarcastic skepticism must never be discounted in even the most apparently serious or lyrical of Blake's poetry'
• Peter Ackroyd

  'His visions were irradiate by contraries ad opposition: love and hate, expansion and contradiction'
• DW. Harding

  'Symbolic implications scarcely susceptible of reasoned explanation'
• DW. Harding

  'For Blake, the constraints exercised by the old contributed to the creation of an abstract moral code'
• DW. Harding

  'Fundamental concern for human life'
• Blake

  'Man has the essence of God and all the wisdom and power of the world within himself'
• Blake

  'Un-organised innocence is an impossibility'
• O'fill

  Blake 'leaves us in the air'
• Rousseau

  'man was born free and everywhere else he is in chains'
• Blake

  Suggests the poems of Songs of Innocence and Experience illustrate the 'two contrary states of the human soul'
• Northrop Frye

  '|The songs of experience are satires, but one of the things they satirise is the state of innocence, conversely, the songs of innocence satirise the state of experience'
• Raymond Williams

  Blake 'criticised his materialistic society for blunting imagination'
• David Punt

  'London' is 'the most concisely violent assault on 'establishment thinking' that English poetry has produced'
• Blake

  'I must create my own systems or be enslaved by another man's'
• Timothy Vines

  'Blake's poems can be analysed as a response to a collapse in human innocence'
• H.G Hewlett

  'imperfect genius'
• Margret Bottrall

  'isolated dreamer'
• M.H Abrams

  'Pheonix among poets'
• Northrop Frye

  Within Experience, 'contempt and horror have never been more clearly spoken in English poetry'
• Caroline Bowles

  'Mad though he might be, he was gifted'
• James Thomson

  'Blake was always poor in world's wealth, always rich in spiritual wealth'
• Gilchrist

  "divine child" "whose playthings were the sun, moon, the stars, the heavens and the earth"
• Blake


  "without contraries is no progression... all are necessary to human existence"
• Bronowski


  "To Blake, all virtue is human virtue"
• Ackroyd


  "Aware of the possible deficiencies of innocence itself"
• Legouis and Cazamian


  "The songs show the impassioned feelings of a child's soul"
• Marsh


  "Repeated emphasis on natural impulses, honesty and freedom in love."
• Marsh 


  "Poison and destruction are bred by hidden feelings and dishonest behaviour."
• Marsh


  "Charity only lessens symptoms, it does not cure the disease."