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Blake was a Swedenborgian
Belief in imagination as an active creative force. He attacked rationalism, authoritarianism, industrialization, and organized religion as destructive of creative and spiritual energies.
William Blake was an engraver, a painter, and a poet. He was little known as a poet during his lifetime, although an interesting connection with another writer is that he illustrated Mary Wollstonecraft's highly successful book for children, Original Stories from Real Life. Blake's reputation became established late in the 19th Century, due in part to his rediscovery by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelites.
William Wordsworth is reported to have said "There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott."
Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) is a relatively early work: Innocence was first published in 1789; Experience, in 1794. The years between these two dates saw the most bloody acts of the French Revolution: the September massacres (1792) and the execution of the Royal Family (1793), followed by the Reign of Terror.
Blake's Songs illustrate two imaginative realms: the state of innocence and the state of experience. Another way of expressing this contrast is to say that the two states represent two different ways of seeing.
Northrop Frye's distinction between the imagined states of innocence and experience:
world of innocence: unfallen world / unified self / integration with nature / time in harmony with rhythm of human existence
world of experience: fallen world / fragmented divided self / alienation from nature / time as destructive, in opposition to human desire
Melba Cuddy-Keane
Reading
Songs of Innocence (1789)
Songs of Experience (1794)
The Book of Thel (1789)
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790)
The French Revolution (1791)
America (1793)
Europe (1794)
The Book of Urizon (1794)
The Book of Los (1795)
Milton (1804–8)
Jerusalem (1804–20).
Writing available on the net
Commentaries
The William Blake Archive (http://www.blakearchive.org/)http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/blake/ (archive of an exhibit of his work at the National Gallery of Victoria)
Project Gutenberg e-texts of poems by William Blake (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/author?name=Blake,%20William)
William Blake 1757 - 1827 Melba Cuddy-Keane The University of Toronto at Scarborough
Quotations
Ancient of Days (God Creating the Universe) c. 1794
