Free Love Quotes Biography
Source (goole.com.pk)Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?'
The Tyger Blake The Tyger Poem
In this poem, Blake's questioning, basically, how something really terrifying, like the tiger, could have been created by God if God creates everything in His/Her image. I guess Blake didn't think that tigers were awesome; that's maybe a cultural difference between then and now. 'The Tyger' is sort of interesting; it's a sister poem to 'The Lamb', which is in Songs of Innocence; 'The Tyger' is in Songs of Experience. These deliberate contrasts occur all over the poem. They sort of match up with each other across Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. In that sense, it ends up being this prototypical Romantic work, in the sense that there is this vision of innocence that refers to childhood, this time when we're sheltered from the dangerous world, then experience, which is what happens to us when we lose that childhood innocence due to the corruption of society or the oppression of organized religion in the form of the Church and the ruling classes. Romantic poets are always trying to capture this contrast between instinct and between reason or nature and civilization, negotiating the dynamics between those things, usually privileging the former over the latter. They like nature and instinct a lot better than reason and experience.
Romantic Works
Outside of poetry, Blake was a radical thinker. He supported the French Revolution, and he opposed England's treatment of the Americas. You can remember this when you forget about when he lived and wrote: late 1700s... American Revolution, French Revolution, William Blake.
Blake supported the French Revolution William Blake Time Period
He also had interesting ideas about marriage and women. He illustrated Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life; she was a famous feminist and also the mother of Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. He ended up, along with her, as kind of a pioneer of the free love movement. I guess British people in fancy tights were doing free love before the hippies were. Some of this might have had to do with the fact that he had some problems in his own marriage. Catherine couldn't have children. Rather than just accept this, Blake criticized the constraints of marriage and wanted to try to bring a concubine into the house. This did not go over well. Suddenly, it seems like he was a little bit less progressive and a little more self-serving, but I'm not going to pass judgments.
Moving along from that, a couple more poetic things that he did - in 1793, he completes a thing called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which is kind of like in Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost; it's about Hell. Since the Romantics weren't such huge fans of organized religion, Hell's actually a really cool place. Blake suggests that Heaven is too authoritarian and too stuffy and guided by rules. In Hell, people can relax, which is quite different than what's going on in Milton and Dante. It's like that expression 'I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.' That's what's going on in Blake's poem. It's the same idea.
So it makes sense that Blake would also write an epic poem called Milton: A Poem (it's like Milton: A Movie.), which was completed in 1810. Again, he has this interest in Hell and poetic tradition in that sense. In this work, John Milton comes back from Heaven and hangs out with Blake. It's an interesting way of exploring the relationship with dead predecessors in poetry and working out things like influence and poetic trajectory in that sense. Writers actually do a lot of this, elegizing each other, talking about each other. Keep a look out for that. It's a favorite quiz question to ask about writers who wrote about other writers.
In 1804, Blake starts working on a poem called Jerusalem, which is his longest and also most illuminated work (that just means more of those illustrations), completed in 1820. It's really long; it has about 100 etched and illustrated plates, which is kind of cool. It involved Blake's own mythology about Britain. There's Albion, who is the primeval fallen man, and other characters. There isn't a linear plot. It's not really beach reading; it's kind of difficult. Jerusalem isn't just a city, it's a female character and it's the title of the book. It gets very complicated very fast. That one's not usually on the syllabus.
Blake died in 1827. At the time of his death, he was working on a bunch of engravings for Dante's Divine Comedy, which, like we said before, he doesn't totally agree with Dante and Milton and their concept of Hell, so his etchings end up being kind of critical of what's going on in Dante. So, that's kind of an interesting final project for him.
Lesson Summary
To sum things up, Blake was a Romantic poet, but he was also a prominent illustrator and engraver. His signature method involved this etching called illuminated printing, which was basically putting all the acid on the paint and letting the image come forth in relief. He thought that his dead brother's ghost taught it to him because, yeah, he was also a mystic who had visions. His major works are Songs of Innocence and Experience, which includes that poem 'The Tyger' that we read, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Milton: A Poem, and Jerusalem. That's a summary of William Blake.
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Free Love Quotes About Life About Friends And Sayings About Love About School Tumbler About Girls Wallpapers About Life Lessons For Kids
Free Love Quotes About Life About Friends And Sayings About Love About School Tumbler About Girls Wallpapers About Life Lessons For Kids
Free Love Quotes About Life About Friends And Sayings About Love About School Tumbler About Girls Wallpapers About Life Lessons For Kids
Free Love Quotes About Life About Friends And Sayings About Love About School Tumbler About Girls Wallpapers About Life Lessons For Kids
Free Love Quotes About Life About Friends And Sayings About Love About School Tumbler About Girls Wallpapers About Life Lessons For Kids
