William Blake hated tyranny and celebrated liberty. Focusing on

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William Blake hated tyranny and celebrated liberty. Focusing on

several poems from Songs of Innocence and Experience discuss to what

extent this is evident.

William Blake, author and illustrator of the 18th and 19th century had

non-conformist emotions, which are represented in his poems from Songs

of Innocence and Experience. Throughout his life he was a visionary

and a radical, these two aspects of his magnificent genius can be seen

as an independent idealism, as is believed today, or, as his

contemporaries thought, a crazy man, born into the real world. These

characteristics of this man may have been shaped by his upbringing,

religion or due to the social and political changes that England was

undergoing at the time. William Blake detested the tyranny in society,

especially religious leaders who, as he felt, were corrupting the

church. He felt that establishments and contemporary fashions under

certain rules represented all the evils God illustrates for us not to

set up.

William Blake felt strongly and spoke freely of love. Some stories

even say that he used to sit out in his garden naked with his wife. It

was his undying love of his wife, which influenced him to write "The

Sick Rose". The poem illustrates the power and evil of corruption as

'The invisible worm', which is invading the natural world of love (the

"Rose") like a maggot getting into an apple, no one can see it

happening until it is too late. The alliteration on the last linein

"The Sick Rose", "Does they life destroy" accentuates and emphasises

the problem that the world is faced with. In his poems, Blake

heightens his attention to the corruption of the natural world:

natural versus unnatural - a device that Blake uses to good effect in...

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...'s views on the world that he was part of and,

ultimately, paradoxically, loved but also detested. His utter hatred

of the industrialised world as he knew it was relieved in his

eccentric visionary ways and his idealistic views on the natural world

as vividly portrayed in his poetry - particularly in "Songs of

Innocence and Experience". Blake celebrates liberty in his poetry

often using the image of innocence to do this. A radical opponent of

Industrialisation and other factors that penetrated the society of his

day such as imperialism, he attacks the tyranny wreaked by the

institutions of the Church and Government in particular in his poetry

using the vivid and heartfelt imagery for which he is now famed. It

his perhaps his vehement hatred of the evils of the Establishment that

drove him to rebel against it in a celebration of liberty through his

poetry.

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