Songs of Innocence and of Experience
An illustrated poetry collection by William Blake, first published in 1794, pairing poems that explore contrasting states of innocence and experience.
William Blake: An English poet, artist, and printmaker whose works unite visionary poetry with handmade images. He wrote, illustrated, and printed the collection.
Contraries: Opposed forces or qualities whose interaction generates change or meaning. Blake’s paired states work as active tensions rather than simple moral opposites.
Songs of Innocence: William Blake’s illustrated poetry collection, first published in 1789, depicting childhood and other forms of innocence. It first appeared separately before Blake paired it with Experience.
The Divine Image: A poem in Blake’s collection associating mercy, pity, peace, and love with human beings and God. It presents compassion as a shared source of divine and human life.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: A prose-and-image work by William Blake that challenges conventional divisions between good and evil. It develops Blake’s broader resistance to fixed moral binaries.
Illuminated printing: A printmaking process in which text and images are etched together, printed, and often hand-colored. Blake used this method to integrate each poem with its visual design.
Poetic speaker: The voice that speaks within a poem, distinct from its author. Child, adult, and institutional voices shape how each state is presented.
Songs of Experience: William Blake’s illustrated poetry collection, first published in 1794, depicting states shaped by suffering and social constraint. It supplied the contrasting sequence for the combined volume.
The Human Abstract: A poem in Blake’s collection tracing virtues such as pity and mercy to conditions of poverty and fear. It offers a darker account of how social suffering produces moral ideals.
Original sin: A Christian doctrine that humanity inherits a condition of sin from Adam and Eve. Blake’s account of innocence and experience does not simply reproduce this doctrine.