Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Abstract

Reading the Songs of Innocence and of Experience requires of us the self-sufficiency and openness to intellectual and imaginative adventure that I discussed in Chapter 1, for the Songs function in a fashion unlike any of Blake’s other illuminated works. Not a single, linear poem organized around a narrative “through-line”, this is a collection of songs , and so expectations and conventions we as readers associate with particular literary genres like the lyric and musical forms like the song figure in how we read the Songs. These multiple formal and generic considerations are parallelled at the level of language itself by the surprising amount of wordplay in which the verbal texts of the Songs engage. Already in his general titles, for instance — Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience and the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience — Blake engages in some of the ambitiously meaningful wordplay that has too often been either seriously underestimated or missed entirely in assessments of his work. 1 The preposition “of” points in two directions: these may be songs about Innocence and Experience, or they may be songs from (“out of”, sung by figures residing within) those states. In fact they are both, but the presence of “and”, together with a second “of” in the title of the combined volume suggests that Blake wishes to keep the two states — and their respective songs and singers — separated both intellectually and semantically. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.