William Blake Poems and Etchings

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This essay will critically examine the poems and etchings of William Blake to assess whether the two contrary states of the human soul are well illustrated. The primary focus will be on the Introduction to Innocence and Experience and Earths Answer weighing the following themes change of time, night/day, lexicon and fusion and repetition of the contrary states of the human soul and weather they are successfully depicted. This essay will also focus on what informed Blake’s writing, his era, religious convictions and political environment. The Essay will then conclude by suggestion that Blake’s contrary states are intertwined. William Blake’s writing have been viewed as going against the grain primarily because he wrote about controversial issues, the fall of man, heaven and hell and politics. What enabled Blake to write these poems is the time he and other poets like William Wordsworth and John Keats lived in which according to the British Literature timeline was classified as the Romantic period characterized by the vast amount of freedom of spirit writers expressed which often challenged the church and portrayed Blake as a radical.() Whilst he was not against Christianity he greatly opposed the church and has been seen as a gnostic believing in Jesus and God but not the church or rather the role the church played then in society. This is because the church and politics were greatly linked and thus the church was ignorant of the state of society and its evils that existed and where fueled by industrialization contrary to the bible this is expressed in the poem chimney sweep where children are abandoned by parents to go to church. "They think they have done me no injury, And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King," ironically Jesus says in the bible “let the little children come to me” Mathew19:14. This drastic dissimilarity according to Blake is on of many

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