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William Blake social criticism
Literature in the romantic period
William Blake social criticism
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Romantic period is an age when writers focus on the power of human mind and seek for the promotion of individual’s sensibility in understanding the world and even creating its own through imagination. However, Romantic writing is not always aimed at the development of individuals. Actually, literary works in this period have a close relationship with social conditions—seeking to promote the development of society is a crucial purpose in Romantic writing. In the following passage, I would like to discuss two famous Romantic authors, William Blake and Washington Irving, and how their works contribute to the development of society.
William Blake is a Romantic poet well-known for the creativity and exuberance in his poetry. Although Blake emphasises on human’s imagination and visions in spiritual world, his poetry also exhibits his reflection upon reality, especially on the social system and people’s living conditions. In his work Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Blake illustrates two different states of human soul, and he is the “seer of visions and communicator of them to society” (Watson 132)—he establishes the connection between the spiritual world and reality by poetry and stresses on the innocence of society in late 18th-century Britain.
Two poems entitled “The Chimney Sweeper” are respectively from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. In these two poems, Blake illustrates the social problem of the abuse of innocence—children are convinced to do their duty, sweeping chimneys, to keep their innocence, and parents force them to do so under the cloak of praising innocence. Children in Songs of Innocence are unaware of the fact that they are exploited and abused and still pursue protection by being obedient and ...
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Works Cited
Anthony, David. “‘Gone Distracted’: ‘Sleepy Hollow,’ Gothic Masculinity, and the Panic of 1819” Early American Literature 40.1 (2005): 111-144
Blake, William. “The Chimney Sweeper.” The Norton Anthology English Literature Eighth Edition Volume 2. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York. 85&90. Print.
Irving, Washington. The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.
Hochschild, Jennifer L. Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Print.
Scallet, Lisa. “Teacher’s Guide to The Core Classics Edition of Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow & Other Tales”. n.p. Core Knowledge Foundation. Web. 12 Dec. 2013
Watson, J. R. English Poetry of the Romantic Period 1789-1830. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1998. Print.
The theme of the suffering innocent person, dying and being diseased, throws a dark light onto the London seen through the eyes of William Blake. He shows us his experiences, fears and hopes with passionate images and metaphors creating a sensibility against oppression hypocrisy. His words come alive and ask for changes in society, government and church. But they remind us also that the continued renewal of society begins with new ideas, imagination and new works in every area of human experience.
While William Blake’s “Holy Thursday” from Songs of Innocence was written before the French Revolution and Blake’s “Holy Thursday” from Songs of Experience was written after, creating obvious differences in formal structure; these poems are also uniquely intertwined by telling the same story of children arriving to church on Holy Thursday. However, each gives a different perspective that plays off each other as well the idea of innocence and experience. The idea that innocence is simply a veil that we are not only aware of but use to mask the horrors of the world until we gain enough experience to know that it is better to see the world for simply what it is.
Abstract: William Blake's Songs of Innocence contains a group of poetic works that the artist conceptualized as entering into a dialogue with each other and with the works in his companion work, Songs of Experience. He also saw each of the poems in Innocence as operating as part of an artistic whole creation that was encompassed by the poems and images on the plates he used to print these works. While Blake exercised a fanatical degree of control over his publications during his lifetime, after his death his poems became popular and were encountered without the contextual material that he intended to accompany them.
His spiritual beliefs reached outside the boundaries of religious elites loyal to the monarchy. “He was inspired by dissident religious ideas rooted in the thinking of the most radical opponents of the monarchy during the English Civil War” (E. P. Thompson). Concern with war and the blighting effects of the industrial revolution were displayed in much of his work. One of Blake’s most famous works is The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Experience. In this collection, Blake illuminates the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children and follow them into adulthood.... ...
In the poem, The Chimney Sweeper by William Blake (1789), the poet attempts to shine a light on the social injustice inflicted upon children by appealing to the reader’s conscience in order to free them from their nightmare existence. He uses a child’s voice as the vehicle to deliver his message in order to draw attention to the injustice of forced child labor. The speaker is a young boy whose mother has passed away. He has no time to properly grieve because his father has sold him into a life of filth and despair. The child weeps not only for the loss of his mother and his father’s betrayal, but also for the loss of his childhood and innocence. Blake cleverly uses sound, imagery, irony, and symbolism in an attempt to provoke outrage over the inhumane treatment and exploitation inflicted upon young children by forcing them into the chimneys.
Though this poem mainly describes the suffering of these children, William Blake wrote another poem also titled “The Chimney Sweeper” where he described how as these chimney-sweepers grew older, they began to realize how they were taken advantage of and how the promises of the Church were all just a big hoax. From these two poems, it can be inferred that Blake intentionally pointed out and revealed the malfeasance of the Church and society and how they exploited younger children due to their gullibility and innocence solely for the economy without having any regard for the children’s lives.
Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper (Songs of Innocence) is a poem about the life of young chimney sweeps. We are presented with two juxtaposed attitudes in this poem and that would be the hope-filled attitude of the speaker pertaining to his lot in life and the attitude of satire that is displayed by the poet himself. In the end the message that conveyed through these conflicting attitudes is one that basically ensures the speaker will not be able to prosper in this life but surly have a chance to in the one after.
Both Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience provide social criticism on the dangers that child chimney sweepers endure but, Songs of Experience provides better social commentary as Songs of Experience directly identifies the potential for death unlike Songs of Innocence which implicitly identifies the dangers child sweeps endure. In Songs of Innocence, the child chimney sweeper dreams that while he was “lock’d up in coffins of black…an Angel who had a bright key… open’d the coffins…set them all free” (Blake, “Innocence” 12-14). The child’s dream of freedom appears happy and optimistic when in reality it is quite chilling that the child views death as freedom. Blake presents the child chimney sweeper as optimistic to suggest that society needs to help the children find freedom so they do not wish to die. The social commentary in Songs of Innocence is implicit in order to emphasize the child’s inability to fully understand and c...
There are often two sides to everything: chocolate and vanilla, water and fire, woman and man, innocence and experience. The presence of two opposing items allows for harmony and balance in the world. Without water, fire cannot be put out and without woman there can be no man. William Blake’s poetry collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience draws parallels between poems of “innocence” and poems of “experience”. His poem The Lamb is mirrored by his poem The Tyger.
Blake wrote two poems with entitled “Chimney Sweeper.” One version was found in his ‘Songs of Innocence’ and the other was found in ‘Songs of Experience.’ Although the first was told with a child almost in mind, and the second was told in a darker, colder point-of-view, they both contain the same concern. This concern is having very young children working as chimney sweepers. Blake talks about how you boys are almost forced into this career
In the poem, “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake, the author attempts to educate the reader about the horrors experienced by young children who are forced into labor at an early age cleaning chimneys for the wealthy. The poem begins with a young boy who has lost his mother but has no time to properly grieve because his father has sold him into a life of filth and despair. The child weeps not only for the loss of his mother and his father’s betrayal, but also for the loss of his childhood and innocence. Blake uses poetry in an attempt to provoke outrage over the inhumane and dangerous practice of exploiting children and attempts to shine a light on the plight of the children by appealing to the reader’s conscience in order to free the children from their nightmare existence.
Although both Blake and Wordsworth show childhood as a state of greater innocence and spiritual vision, their view of its relationship with adulthood differs - Blake believes that childhood is crushed by adulthood, whereas Wordsworth sees childhood living on within the adult. In the William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the vision of children and adults is placed in opposition to one another. Blake portrays childhood as a time of optimism and positivity, of heightened connection with the natural world, and where joy is the overpowering emotion. This joyful nature is shown in Infant Joy, where the speaker, a newborn baby, states “’I am happy, Joy is my name.’” (Line 4-5).
LaGuardia, Cheryl. "WILLIAM BLAKE: SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE." Library Journal 128.9 (2003): 140. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 13 July 2011.
This reinforced the tradition of using children as chimney-sweepers and reminds readers that the workers are young individuals being exploited by the work force. The image of the child is dehumanized in his suffering based on societal treatment that reinforces their status as lesser beings through their young and impoverished position (Benziman, 176). Blake “appropriates” the child’s voice as a means to provide an “adult” social “discourse” about the institutional neglect of chimney-sweeps and other child labourers (Benziman, 176). The child that the narrative speaker encounters is initially seen saying ‘“weep,’ ‘weep’”, which is an attempt at the chimney-sweeper’s cry to attract business, yet the omission of the phonetic “s” sound is dualistic in its poetic function (Blake, “The Chimney Sweep” 2). The sweeps inability to pronounce the first letter of the word is a common feature of disordered speech development in children thus exposing how young the child is but also showing his limited ability to express his plight (Benziman, 174). In addition the “bitter echo” of the word “weep” in the attempt to say, “sweep”, links the concept of his deep sorrow that has been caused by his labour as a chimney-sweep (Benziman, 174). In other words, the climbing boy’s agony within the
Over the years, the classic man saving the helpless woman routine, has evolved into a more feminist view where the woman saves the man, for example .