William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience

During William Blake's career as a poet, he spent the majority of his life in this town of Soho, England. This drawing shows the depiction of Soho, England around the year 1700 and it's detrimental to understanding Blake's Songs of Innocence. When Blake writes about the chimney sweeps and the children of London, he's drawing from a first-hand experience, as Soho was one of the most industrious cities in Britain at the time. This is what a typical housing area in Soho looked like, with chimneys lining every single building, billowing smoke. In Blake's The Chimney…

Introduction

“Thus did my mother say and kissed me, / And thus I say to little English boy. / When I from black and he from white cloud free, / And round the tent of God like lambs we joy.”

At first glance, “Little Black Boy” written by William Blake may seem like a poem about a little African boy’s journey with Christianity, but is it just that? Over time there have been many written pieces that are aimed to crush racism but instead have the opposite effect. A common pattern is the use of an omnipotent and omniscient God that reinforces racial injustice. It isn’t including a…

This is an image from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The work was originally published in 1789. The publishing was done solely by Blake himself through a process he invented in 1788, illuminated printing. Illuminated printings was a lengthy process that printed both the text and image on the same copper plate, a very revolutionary concept for the time. After Blake had settled on his final drafts on both image and poem, the text and image were written out in reverse in stop-out varnish. Stop out varnish is an acid-resistant varnish that was applied to a copper plate.…