William Blake's Poetry

William Blake's poetry gives songlike simplicity and complex visionary imagery different roles within a searching spiritual imagination. Songs of Innocence and of Experience places contrasting voices and situations beside one another, bringing childhood, labour, compassion, and oppression into view. The Lamb and The Tyger approach creation through markedly different images and questions. In longer illuminated works, Blake develops an elaborate symbolic language informed by biblical traditions and his own imaginative figures. Verse, lettering, and design interact on the page, so that the visual form can reinforce or complicate what a speaker seems to say.