The best of Blake

A guide to his poetry

Both a literary and visual work of art, William Blake’s extraordinary Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) sits among his most celebrated works. The collection appeared in two phases: Blake published his Songs of Innocence in 1789 as a freestanding book of 19 illuminated poems that explore the sweetness of childhood, before five years later adding a further 26 poems titled Songs of Experience. These later poems delve into the bitterness, repression and vice that Blake felt to pervade modern society, and the combined work was hence published under the title Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

Each poem is brief and deceptively simple, echoing the singsong rhythms and rhymes of popular 18th-century children’s verse. Yet these poems are infinitely more radical than their form suggests. They are rich in ambiguity, astonishingly imaginative and underpinned by Blake’s radical and uncompromising views on human nature and the contemporary world. The collection condemns the repressive authority of church and state, celebrates sexual freedom and addresses the horrors of racial inequality and child labour, to remain a fearless, luminous and powerful work of art.