Papers On William Blake Annotated

HS5610: POETRY
ASSIGNMENT: WILLIAM BLAKE

ARYAPADMAM C.
HS11H011

INTRODUCTION

William Blake was one of the most well-known English authors, whose works were seminal part of the Romantic movement in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century Europe . He was not only a poet but also a painter as well as a printmaker too. He created diverse and symbolically rich work of art through his imagination. But his works were criticized by his contemporaries and he was given the label of ‘a poor man who is mad’. Blake’s work was mentioned as ‘diseased and wild’ by John Ruskin, even though Ruskin noted that Blake’s mind as ‘great and wise’. However, it was only in the Twentieth century that Blake was acknowledged as a notable poet and artist.
Blake’s poems are simple and lyrical in form, but there are complex works too, which needs the reader to work hard to understand what Blake means. This complexity is due to the presence of mythological in addition to the philosophical sources present in his work. Blake himself has stated that he had to "create a System, or be enslaved by another Man 's.” this reasons the presence of vague thoughts and allusions in his work. The reader has to struggle to apprehend Blake’s perspective on the issues of religion, faith and belief. The efforts put to understand Blake’s works will assist the readers to know the revolutionary and visionary artist and poet whose works represented new direction in the course of English Poetry and the