Blake's 'Innocence' and 'Experience' Retraced

by Gardner, Stanley

• ISBN13: 9781472509895
• ISBN10: 1472509897
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-05-08
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

This major work of historical and interpretative scholarship draws upon fresh evidence to set the Songs in a new perspective. Blake's etchings are substantially discussed alongside the poems they illustrate. The plates of both Innocence and Experience are considered in detail as Blake's response to social circumstances between 1782 and 1794. The reader is asked to re-think the nature of ‘the Two Contrary States', and the relationship of the designs to the understanding of Blake.

Author Biography

Table of Contents

List of illustrations in the text
Acknowledgements
Chronological table of Blake’s life, to 1796
Foreword
Introduction
Innocence
1 Wimbledon and the house in King Street
2 A different pastoral
3 The islanders and education
4 The charity children
5 Cherish pity
6 Infancy, angels and human need
7 Tom Dacre and sorrows
Songs of Innocence and of Experience: the plates
Experience
8 Ideas of good and evil
9 Enigmatic assurances
10 Systematized tyranny
11 All this dreadful ruin
12 Misshaping the soul
13 The gardens of Experience
14 Poison and the Tyger
The poems
Notes
Index