Abstract
Reading the Songs of Innocence and of Experience requires of us the self-sufficiency and openness to intellectual and imaginative adventure that I discussed in Chapter 1, for the Songs function in a fashion unlike any of Blake’s other illuminated works. Not a single, linear poem organized around a narrative “through-line”, this is a collection of songs, and so expectations and conventions we as readers associate with particular literary genres like the lyric and musical forms like the song figure in how we read the Songs. These multiple formal and generic considerations are parallelled at the level of language itself by the surprising amount of wordplay in which the verbal texts of the Songs engage. Already in his general titles, for instance — Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience and the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience — Blake engages in some of the ambitiously meaningful wordplay that has too often been either seriously underestimated or missed entirely in assessments of his work.1 The preposition “of” points in two directions: these may be songs about Innocence and Experience, or they may be songs from (“out of”, sung by figures residing within) those states. In fact they are both, but the presence of “and”, together with a second “of” in the title of the combined volume suggests that Blake wishes to keep the two states — and their respective songs and singers — separated both intellectually and semantically.
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Notes
Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, tenth ed., rev. John Owen Ward (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 375.
Zachary Leader, Reading Blake’s “Songs” (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).
Leader, p. 60.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate(2 vols.; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), II, 6.
On this matter, see especially Ruthven Todd, William Blake the Artist (London: Studio Vista, 1971),
and Robert N. Essick, William Blake, Printmaker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
John Thomas Smith, Nollekens and His Times (1828),
in G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 457. Bentley reports Mrs. Linnell’s recollection, which comes via Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of Blake (1863) in Blake Records, p. 305. 18. See Fairchild, p. 5 and passim.
Allan Cunningham, Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1830), in Bentley, Blake Records, p. 482.
William Sloane, Children’s Books in England and America in the Seventeenth Century: A History and Checklist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955).
On the history of English children’s books before 1800, see especially Samuel Pickering, John Locke and Children’s Books in Eighteenth-Century England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981);
Mary V. Jackson, Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from Its Beginnings to 1839 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); and Leader, Reading Blake’s “Songs”, chapter 1.
Blake’s engravings are reproduced in Roger R. Easson and Robert N. Essick, William Blake, Book Illustrator (3 vols, incomplete; Normal and Memphis: American Blake Foundation, 1979), II, (XXVII].
On the former association, see especially Hagstrum, William Blake: Poet and Painter; on the latter, see David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, rev. edn (Garden City: Doubleday / Anchor, 1969), and Carretta, George III and the Satirists.
On the former, see Stephen C. Behrendt, “Art as Deceptive Intruder: Audience Entrapment in Eighteenth-Century Verbal and Visual Art”, Papers on Language and Literature 19 (1983), 37–52; on the latter,
see Martha England, “The Satiric Blake: Apprenticeship at the Haymarket?” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 72 (1969), 440–64, 531–50.
David Fuller, Blake’s Heroic Argument (London: Croom Helm, 1988), p. 15.
John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes(New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), p. 728.
Susan C. Fox, Poetic Form in Blake’s “Milton” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 22.
Anne Kostelanetz MellorBlake’s Human Form Divine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 8.
Irene Chayes, “The Presence of Cupid and Psyche”, BIake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. David V. Erdman and John E. Grant(Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1970). pp. 214–43.
M. P. Bryden and F. Allard, “Visual Hemifield Differences Depend on Typeface”, Brain and Language, 3 (1976), 198–9. The literature on this topic is of course too enormous even to survey here.
D. G. Gillham, Blake’s Contrary States: The “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” as Dramatic Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1966). p. 197.
See William Blake’s Water-Colours Illustrating the Poems of Thomas Gray, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Chicago: J. Philip O’Hara, 1972) and Butlin, Paintings and Drawings, pp. 60, 477, plate 885.
See Stephen C. Behrendt, “‘The Consequence of High Powers’: Blake, Shelley, and Prophecy’s Public Dimension”, Papers on Language and Literature, 22 (1986), 254–75.
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© 1992 Stephen C. Behrendt
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Behrendt, S.C. (1992). Songs of Innocence and of Experience. In: Reading William Blake. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230380165_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230380165_2
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