AO5 - Blake

• 'The first part sets out an imaginative vision of the state of innocence; the second shows how life is challenges and corrupts and destroys it."


  Bowra
• 'In Songs of Experience he often uses symbols of his own making, and his meaning is more elusive.”


  Bowra
• “For Blake, God and the imagination are one'

  'Apart from the man the idea of God has no meaning'


  Bowra
• The Songs of Experience are 'born of a deep anguish, from a storm in the poet’s soul'


  Bowra
•  'A comprehensive attack on the political and religious establishment' 


  Marsh
• 'They call for a fundamental change, they are revolutionary works.'


  Marsh
• 'Launches an assault on the very bases of an oppressive society: capitalism, organised religion and military power."


  Marsh
• Experience is 'a state of existence in which ... we have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and have been evicted from Paradise.'


  Brassington