Samarkand state institute of foreign language faculty of english language II

William Blake’s Contribution as a Poet

Pre-Romanticism is a cultural movement in Europe from about the 1740s onward

that preceded and presaged the artistic movement known as Romanticism . Chief
among these trends was a shift in public taste away from the grandeur, austerity,
nobility, idealization, and elevated sentiments of Neoclassicism or Classicism toward simpler, more sincere, and more natural forms of expression. Emphasizing the free expression of emotion rather than polite restraint in friendship and love, the pre romantic poets opined that the free expression of the creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures.The new emphasis on genuine emotion can be seen in a whole range of Pre-Romantic trends like the graveyard school of English poetry of the 1740s, with Edward Young’s and Thomas Gray’s melancholy evocations of sorrow, bereavement, death, and decay, the Sturm und Drang movement in Germany which exalted nature, feeling, and human individualism and finally the ambitious efforts to collect and preserve folktales and ballads of all types.
Of all the Romantic Poets of the eighteenth century, William Blake is the most independent and the most original. In his earliest work, written when he was scarcely more than a child, he seems to go back to the Elizabethan song writers for his models; but for the greater part of his life he was the poet of inspiration alone, following no man's lead, and obeying no voice but that which he heard in his own mystic soul. The curious, pantheistic conception of nature was not a matter of creed, but the very essence of Blake's life. Strangely enough, he made no attempt to find a new religious cult. For over forty years he labored diligently at book engraving, guided in his art by Michael Angelo, but investing his own curious designs, at which we still wonder. Again, Blake's poems can be read on four levels, the levels which Dante had suggested for the interpretation of his Divine Comedy. These are:
1. Literal: On this level, the poem can be read simply as a sequence of actions,
situations, descriptions, and so on.
2. Moral: On this level, the poem may be read as a series of moral commands,
both positive and negative. A system of rewards for right actions and punishments for wrong deeds is given in Dante's poem.
3. Allegorical: On this level, all actions are interpreted in terms of some dogma.
4. Anagogical: On this highest level, a poem can be given a mystical reading.
For example, Jerusalem may stand for different things depending on the choice of the level of interpretation. On the literal level it is a city in Palestine, allegorically it may mean the Church; morally it may mean the believing soul; analogically it may imply the City of God.
Although Blake had lived in the neoclassical age, he was out of sympathy with its
poetic themes, forms and techniques. He went back to the Elizabethan and early
seventeenth century poets, to the Ossianic poems, Collins, and other eighteenth
century writers outside the main stream poetic tradition of Alexander Pope and Dr.
Samuel Johnson for his lyric models. He also introduced partial rhymes and new rhythms and used daring figures of speech.
“Human imagination is the Divine Vision and Fruition”, he opines. Energy and delight accompany this expression of the Divine Vision. All these views on the subject of poetry spring from the intensely romantic nature of Blake. It is not merely the revolutionary spirit that permeates his poetry. The subject of child is more crucial to his art. We see in Holy Thursday I:
“These flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit
with radiance all their own” [11.95]
The “Songs of Innocence” encapsulates the world of Nature. Despite his strong
emotions and his unfamiliar ideas, Blake keeps his form wonderfully limpid and
melodious. Besides love for children, imagination plays a key role in his poetry as
Tyger embodies:
“When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears;
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he Who made the Lamb make thee?”
Symbolically, this poem is an impassioned defense of energy and imagination. The
tiger is Blake’s symbol for the “abundant life”, and for regeneration. The poem
effectively conveys to us the splendid though terrifying qualities of the tiger.The tiger is Blake’s symbol for the “abundant life”, and for regeneration. Blake’s humanitarian
sympathies are seen in such poems of Experience as Holy Thursday, A Little Boy Lost, The Chimney Sweeper, and above all London as in the following lines:
“In every voice, in every ban.
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear”
In London, Blake attacks social injustice in its various forms, as it shows itself in the chimney sweeper’s cry, the hapless soldier’s sigh, and the youthful harlot’s curse. He appears here as an enemy of what he calls “the-mind-forged manacles”. The boy in Blake’s poetry finds the church an inhospitable place, while the ale-house is warm and friendly because the church imposes religious discipline like fasting and prayer.
Pastoralism, too is the feature of his poetry. The little pastoral poem ‘The Shepherd’
has a delicate simplicity. It celebrates the happiness of rural responsibility and trust.
Noteworthy also is ‘The Echoing Green’ with its picturesqueness in a warmer hue, its delightful domesticity, and its expressive melody.
Blake’s verse and artwork became part of the wider movement of Romanticism in late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century European Culture. His writing combines a variety of styles: he is at once an artist, a lyric poet, a mystic and a visionary. Blake’s use of images, symbols, metaphors and revolutionary spirit combined with simple diction and spontaneous expression of thoughts and emotions make him a typically bridge poet who can be categoriesd as the last of the pre romantic poet and one of the first romantic poets in the history of English Literature.