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The A-Z of William Blake: E is for the songs of experience

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From: The Independent - London
Date: 20001110
Author:

EXPERIENCE AND Innocence are, as Blake's subtitle puts it, the two "contrary states of the human soul": the latter term includes, among other things, the condition of man before the Fall and the unblighted world of childhood; the former denotes the postlapsarian and adult worlds.

Blake's illustrated books Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) are complementary accounts of these two states, and remain the most readable and widely loved of all his works. Among the best-known Songs of Experience are "The Tyger" ("Tyger, Tyger, burning bright/In the forests of the night..."), ...

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