This is an essay for a class about the poet and author WIlliam Blake. This should be written by someone who is very familiar with William Blake and has read “The Complete Poems” edited by Alice Ostriker.
Essays should be five-to-six pages (1500-1800 words), double-spaced, with normal margins. Be sure to give your essay a title. E-mail a copy of your essay to me at the e-mail above attached as a Word file (.doc or .docx), or a Rich Text File (.rft). Papers are due by midnight, Friday, October 11.
Choose one of the following questions.
1. Consider Blake’s concepts of “Innocence” and “Experience” by performing a close reading of “Introduction” or “The Lamb” from Songs of Innocence along with “The Tyger” or “The Human Abstract” from The Songs of Experience.
(So, a close reading of one poem from “Innocence” compared to a close reading of one poem from “Experience.”) Keep in mind the drafts of both “The Tyger” and “The Human Abstract” to be found in The Complete Poems on pp. 145-8. Consider as well how these concepts of Innocence and Experience relate to Blake’s notion of “Contraries.”
2. Concerning Blake’s reading of Milton in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Northrop Frye, in Fearful Symmetry, writes:
“Milton’s God, Blake says, is the real Satan, the prince of the power of the air, the creator of a physical universe which is the subterranean cave or hell of eternity. The real God dwells in the real Eden, a city of flaming fire. Milton’s Satan is [a figure representing] the power of human desire which gradually and inevitably declines into passive acceptance of impersonal law and external reason. Thus Blake’s point is not that Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost, but that there is no hero of Paradise Lost.” (219)
If this is true, who (or what) is the hero of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell? And why would Blake write such a satirical work to make the point that Frye is suggesting?
Consider some of the meanings of Blake’s work: To whom is it written? How do its parts – and their different genres (free verse, proverb, prose parody) interrelate? Consider why this book remains Blake’s best-known, most frequently referenced work.
3. Referring to “The Four Zoas,” S. Foster Damon calls the universe Blake has created “psychological” (A Blake Dictionary, p. 142). The Book of Urizen and The Book of Los mirror each other: both tell the story of the binding of Urizen by Los, both are parodies of the first chapter of Genesis, and both effectively invent the two major personae of Blake’s imaginal world.
If, as Damon contends, Blake’s universe is psychological, then of what part of his psychology are Urizen and Los representative? Propose a reading of either or both of these poems that asserts a meaning for these poems in the sense of a psychology of the literary imagination more broadly, or Blake’s imagination more restrictively.
