Blake Critics

• The Chimney Sweeper (innocence)

  'An exercise in repression'

  'His greatest anger is reserved for the forces... that restrict our vision and prevent us from understanding both our oppression and the infinite possibilities of true perception'

  PROTO-MARXIST protest poem, established church maintains dispossessed in state of 'false consciousness'
• The Chimney Sweeper (experience)

  • Freedman - 'The Chimney Sweeper of Experience knows his position is one of 'misery' and angrily berates society for it
  • Norton - 'his greatest anger is reserved for the forces'
• Holy Thursday (innocence)

  • 'They call for a fundamental change... they are revolutionary works'
• Holy Thursday (experience)

  • 'challenges the very image of Great Britain as a rich and civilised nation' 'statement that it was 'a land of poverty' was radical
  • Marsh suggests the voice is 'outraged' and speaks with 'revolutionary anger'
• The Tyger (experience)

  • 'The poem consists of a series of questions that are never fully answered, circling round us in the same way a tiger stalks its prey'
  • the tiger becomes 'a potent image for what W B Yeats would later call the 'terrible beauty of revolution'
  • 'The Tyger is both the antithesis of the lamb and its necessary counterpart, emphasising the coexistence of contrary states such as good and evil'
• The Garden of Love (experience)

  • 'For Blake sexuality and instinct are holy'
  • 'The poem marks the psychological passage from childhood innocence to adult experience'
  • 'Urizen embodies the impulse that Blake identifies... in conservative forms of religion, to control through law-making the energetic sources of life, particularly desire' - Roberts
  • Marriage act 1753^
• Introduction - Songs of Innocence

  • 'fundamental interdependence of innocence and experience'
  • Experience is a state of existence in which we have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and have been evicted from paradise - Brassington
• The Ecchoing Green

  • 'Blake provides a speaker who appears to be on the edge of experience'
  • 'Gathering of generations represents 'the full spectrum of Earthly existence'
• Earths Answer

  • Blake 'recasts the fall in terms of a malicious God' who keeps Earth imprisoned
  • 'The songs of experience are more powerful and more magical than the Songs of Innocence because they are born of deep anguish, from a storm in the poets soul' - C.M. Bowra
• London

  • 'Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains'
  • 'Every charter'd town is an aristocratical monopoly in itself'
  • London is 'the most concisely violent assault on Establishment thinking that English poetry has ever produced'
  • 'The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed'
  • false consciousness MARXIST lens
  • 'autopsy'
• The Little Black Boy

  • Post-Colonial reading - deconstructs the view of the Noble Savage stock character (uncorrupted by civilisation, in harmony with mother nature) that was adopted by the Romantics. Viewpoint of the colonised , gives identity
  • 'Blake not only celebrates hackneyed colourist tropes that equate dark/black and white/light but rather doubles down by insisting that the metaphorical connotations of this Manichean dichotomy be taken literally'
  • 'Flaws inherent in a dualistic perception of the world'