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It is amazing how, by just reading a very simple four-lined poem one can free oneself
from the ropes of reason and plunge into the spirit of an age. And it is especially with
Romanticism that imagination and subjectivity take the lead and transport us to a world where
the concepts of innocence, experience, emotion, religion, nature, love and time start to be seen
under a different light, a romantic shade which reflects the values, beliefs and opinions of one of
the most turbulent eras in history. As the French writer Charles Nodier summed up in his artists
plight in 1820: Romantic poetry springs from our agony and despair; this is not a fault in our
art, but a necessary consequence of the advances made in our progressive society.
Through the development of this paper, I will try to study under a romantic light the
works of one of the first representatives of the Romantic Movement in England: William Blake.
The words Innocence, Revolution, Irony, and Justice will be of transcendental importance in
analysing the creations of this poet, engraver, painter and musician as a product of the 18 th
Century England.
In order to understand Blakes work as a reflection of and, at the same time, reaction to
his own times, we must first shed some light on the characteristics of the political, social and
artistic life of the Romantic England. Only after studying the characteristics of this era of
revolution we will be able to unveil the underlying meanings present in most of Blakes works,
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and we will understand how the poets words: The times require that one should speak out
boldly 1 carry in themselves the essence of Romanticism.
In order to grasp the essence of this era, I will try to trace it from its very origins. The
birth of the word Romanticism can be traced back to the Middle Ages. Back then, the word
romance denoted the new vernacular languages derived from Latin. A roman or romantcame
to be known as an imaginative work and a courtly romance. In France a distinction was made
between the terms romanesque (which acquired derogative connotations, such as exaggerated,
bizarre, chimerical) and romantique (which meant tender, gentle, sentimental and sad). It was
used in the English form, romantic, in these latter senses as from the 18th Century.
The introduction of this term in the literary contexts of those times came with the
German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel. He described the romantic as that which depicts
emotional matter in an imaginative form. His brother August implied that romantic literature is
in contrast to that of classicism, thus describing one of its most outstanding characteristics.
Quite early in the 18th C, one can discern an air of sensibility and feeling, particular in
relation to the natural order and Nature, and it is with the presence of these characteristics that
we can establish the setting in motion of the literary Romantic Movement in Europe. 2
From the beginning of the 18 th Century, Romanticism was mostly associated with its
radical opposition to classicism. The literary critic Margaret Drabble describes the Romantic
essence as:
the emphasis on emotion, imagination, individuality and a certain sense of
opposition to what had gone before, namely the Enlightment of the late 17th
and 18th centuries with its espousal of reason as the key to all
understanding.3
The idea that Romanticism stood in opposition to the order and formal symmetry of
what was called the Classical, or Neo Classical, with its strong emphasis on civilised good
order, is present in many works of those times, not only in literature but also in painting and
music. This indeed is the spirit of Romanticism: it must constantly re invent, rediscover and re
assert itself, and by doing so it gets in contact with an independent, subjective experience of
reality, as the German poet Novalis held:
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The world must be romanticised. So its original meaning will again be
found. To romanticize is nothing other than an exponential heightening4
This constant seeking to dismantle the traditional conventions can be thought of as a
consequence of the artists frustrations by the limitations of the Enlightment ideals to place
reason over emotion. As a result, Romantic artists valued the concept of subjectivity highly.
They all (Romantic Poets) see the implication of imagination, symbol,
myth and organic nature, and see it as part of the great endeavour to overcome
the split between subject and object, the self and the world, the conscious and
the unconscious. This is the central creed of the great Romantic poets in
England, Germany and France. It is a closely coherent body of though and
feeling 5
The importance of feeling and emotion over reason can be clearly felt in Baudelaires
words: Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor in exact truth, but in
a way of feeling. The form and meaning of the subjective experience often aspired to a
spiritual, quasi mystical significance which was later expressed in the highly symbolic and
religious language characteristic of the Romantic Movement, posing a real or sometimes
perceived threat to established religion and its values.
Generally, this subjective and quasi mystical experience took place in natural
environments, where the poet or painter could establish an intimate connection with his or her
soul, so much so that veneration of Nature was akin to a religious experience, just at a period
when the forces of civilisation, with industrialization and urbanization, were posing a great
danger to the English natural surroundings.
Together with this admiration for Nature, Romantic artists also praised and focused
their reflections on the state of innocence in human beings, valuing the senses of wonder and
alienation from the evils of experienced, mature society. This constant seeking of innocence,
and its subsequent rejection to all forms of social control, tinted the Romantic Movement with a
sense of revolutionary change that the artists of that time didnt hesitate to acquire. Politically,
poets and painters of this era were in favour of radical, or even revolutionary change, so much
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so that patriotism, nationalism, revolution and armed struggle for independence also became
popular themes in the arts of this period. One of the Romanticism's key ideas and most enduring
legacies is the assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic art and
political philosophy.
From the beginning of the 18th Century onwards, Western Europe experienced political
and social revolutions the like and the speed of which had never previously been experienced.
Overshadowing all other events was the cataclysmic influence of the French Revolution of 1789
which sharpened the historical sense in a way that no other event had ever done6: The impact
of the Revolution, the Terror, the rise of Napoleon, was seen by many as sharply dividing the
past from a new type of future. It implied a new way of looking at history, a new conception of
reality. For some this was a terrifying prospect, for others it was greeted optimistically. For the
Romantics this early optimism turned to disappointment and disillusion when realising that the
results of a revolution which sacrificed its people for the cause of freedom was, in a way,
repeating the past and enslaving the minds to a certain kind of thought. Therefore, Romantic
attitudes closely accompanied revolution, radicalism and subsequently, disappointment.
In the field of politics the romantics were intensely active in both thought and deed. The
focus changed away from the concerns of royalty and the aristocracy as somehow embodying
the affairs of state, towards far more democratic notions of politics. By 1821 the Romantic poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley was able to claim in his A defence of poetry that poets revealed less
their spirit than the spirit of the age and are the unacknowledged legislators of the world 7.
This idea of the democratic power held by poets in Romantic times was later developed by
Marilyn Gaull in her bookEnglish Romanticism and the Human Context:
When Homer sang of national wars, or Chaucer performed at court, or
Shakespeare dramatised the chronicles of kings, politics and poetry shared
the same frame of reference: the activities and interests of the aristocracy, the
centre of political power. But during the romantic period, poets became
active in political activities that had no poetic precedence, for they lived in an
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age of democratic revolution, engaged in political dissent, and identified with
the people 8
War and revolution can be especially dramatic examples of historical change, but less
dramatic contextual factors were also at work during this period, effecting profound and lasting
social and economic changes along Western Europe. Crucially, the Romantic period saw both
economic expansion and hardship through the development of Capitalism. During this period,
Western Europe witnessed a growth in its population, an expansion on trade and industry,
therefore, a quickening pace of social change, so that the idea conveyed in the phrase Industrial
Revolution is as important as the political change resulting from it. Accompanying these
changes was a dramatic expansion of economic markets into continents outside Europe as a
consequence of a growth of imperialism and the exploitation of these areas as a source of raw
materials for the Industrial Revolution. The darkest side of this imperialist venture was the slave
trade and here Romantics played a significant part in leading opposition to slavery. Blake, for
example, implicitly acknowledged the horror of slavery in his poem The Little Black Boy:
And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove 9
Since culture serves as a mirror of society, the arts reflected the tensions, conflicts and
signs of transition which characterised these turbulent times. Literature, like all arts, like
language, is a collective activity strongly conditioned by social forces, what needs to be said or
what is allowed to say in a particular community at a specific time. We should not forget that
authors are, first of all citizens, and that within any community opinions, values, tastes are
socially generated. As Marilyn Butler puts it: Though writers are gifted with tongues to
articulate the Spirit of the Age, they are also moulded by the age. 10
As a result of its turbulent characteristics, The Romantic period was characterised by
intense spiritual confusion and seeking. The growth of rationalism and empiricism during the
Enlightment had doubtless led to a devaluation of religious experience in any immediate sense.
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Romanticism challenged this conventional stability through the restoration of spiritual
experience to the centre of human concerns. Romantic literature was frequently intimately
confessional, emphasising the uniqueness of individual experience through the use of the
imagination. The key word here is imagination, which for writers such as Blake and Coleridge
meant the visionary faculty, enabling spiritual insight into ultimate truth:
If the spectator could enter into these images in his imagination, if he
could make a friend and companion of these images of wonder then would he
arise from his grave, then would he meet the Lord in the air and then would he be
happy. General knowledge is remote knowledge; it is in particulars that wisdom
consists and happiness too. 11
One of the characteristics of Blakes work that makes it so interesting and in a way,
intense, is its use of diverse media. Since Blake believed that Painting, as well as poetry and
music, exists and exults in immortal thoughts12 it is appropriate that he used each of these sister
arts to express his artistic vision and in this way, making his creations so especial. As Blake saw
art as a whole, he would have probably known that lyric poetry, the poetry of powerful emotion
and personal introspection so privileged and fostered by the Romantics, derives its name from
lyre, the stringed instrument used by ancient poets in the performance of their odes. In this
way, his work Songs of Innocence and Experience gathers the three veins of art in itself: music,
present in the form of his work, together with the rhythm and cadence, poetry, with it powerful
intention to foster introspection and reflection and painting, in the creative process of engraving
which he himself applied to each of the poems in this collection.
In sketching designs, engraving plates, writing songs, and composing
music, he employed his time, with his wife sitting at his side, encouraging him in all
his undertakings. As he drew the figure, he meditated the song which was to
accompany it, and the music to which the verse was to be sung, was the offspring too
of the same moment. The first fruits of this process were the Songs of Innocence
and Experience 13
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As Blake understood the song as a social medium having the power to move listeners to
thoughtful critical reflection, he engaged himself in the writing of one of the most critical pieces
of poetry produced during the Romantic times: Songs of Innocence and Experience: Showing
the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. This work presents two groups of poems divided
into the titles of Innocence and Experience. The Songs are both for and about children, and talk
about what Blake saw as the liberating imaginative power and truthfulness of the state of
innocence:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour. 14
The concept of childhood innocence is going to be one of the most important themes
across the poems, reflecting Blakes own feelings and thoughts as regards the treatment of
children in the Romantic England. Traditionally, childhood, if seen as separate from maturity at
all, was viewed simply as a means to an end: a preparation for adulthood during which
corrective measures were often taken with the purpose of installing the proper behaviour in the
juvenile minds. Coupled with economic hardship was a high infant mortality rate; indeed the
two were often linked: overworked, underfed children were unlikely to survive into adulthood.
Under these circumstances parents didnt make too great an emotional investment in their
children. What is more, the theological doctrine of original sin, embedded in official
Christianity, served to justify a negative view of childhood: experience was valued above
innocence in alleviating the effects of sinfulness.
However, for the Romantics a new vision of innocence gained ground, in which the
sense of wonder in childhood was valued as being similar to the sense of purity and newness
essential to imaginative creativity at any age. As we can see from the words of German
Philosopher, Friedrich Schiller: For, to declare it once and for all, Man plays only when he is,
in the full meaning of the word, Man, and is only wholly Man, when at play. 15
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By the time William Blake published his Songs of Innocence, one of the first and
fullest expressions of a Romantic position on childhood innocence, the tradition of celebrating
the visions of childhood had become diluted. The spirit of Romanticism placed the notion of
childhood innocence at its very centre. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of
Blake. In the introduction he wrote that this piece of art was devised To liberate adult
consciousness through a recovery of the key characteristics of innocence.
The subtitle of Songs from Innocence and Experience is Showing the two Contrary
States of the Human Soul. The word Contrary has a specific and important meaning in Blake:
For two thousand years Western thought had been intensely dualistic, seeing everything as
composed of warring opposites: head and heart, body and spirit, male and female, human and
non human, life and death, innocence and experience good and evil, heaven and hell, as though
the split between the hemispheres of the human brain were projecting itself on everything
perceived by that brain. 16
In Romantic times dualism had taken the Christian churches into the spiritually sterile
preoccupation with sin, defined in obsessively sexual terms. The churches seemed to be for
Blake the worst enemies of any true religion. Thus, by describing at the outset innocence and
experience as contrary states of the human soul Blake seems to be warning us that we are not
being invited to choose between them, and that we are not simply going to be offered here the
truism that innocent joy is preferable to the sorrows of experience. As we read his works, we
find ourselves engaged in a process of mental fight, the Blakean Ideal of critical exchange
according to which Opposition is true Friendship 17
As a result of this impossibility of separating the two opposite sides, there are many
poems from the Innocence section which he cannot keep out of the shadow of experience.
Several of the apparently carefree poems are deceptive when looked at more closely. One of the
first examples is the introduction: The illustration on the cover depicts a shepherd with his pipe,
led and inspired by the winged infant above him. In the poem, Blake seems to characterise
himself, the creative poet, as a piper, then a singer and finally as a writer:
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Piping down the valleys wild
Piping songs of pleasant glee
On a cloud I saw a child
And he laughing said to me
Pipe a song about a lamb
So I piped with merry cheer
Piper pipe that song again
So I piped; he wept to hear
Drop they pipe thy happy pipe
Sing thy songs of happy cheer
So I sung the same again
While he wept with joy to hear
Piper sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read
So he vanished from my sight
And I plucked a hollow reed
And I made a rural pen
And I stained the water clear
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear
This introductory poem can be read as a sort of manifesto of the role of the Romantic
poet: aiming at writing inspired by and intended to refresh the spirit of innocence, seeking to
capture the fleeting moment of imaginative vision. There is throughout the poem a pervading
sense of optimism, harmonious resolution of any conflict. However, a subtle reading of these
introductory lines may create a sense of doubt in the reader: the rural pen stained the water
clear perhaps suggesting the corruption of the purity of the original moment. These words
introduce the idea of sin and corruption. In the very act of celebrating childish innocence, the
poet corrupts it through its inability to prevent the shadow of his own experience falling over
the scene.
In many respects, Blakes attention to children and his preoccupation with the transition
from the world of innocence into the mature world, echo the thoughts and ideas of another
exponent of the Romantic thought: the Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau 18. Rousseaus
ideas can be seen, in a way, as an antithesis to those of Blake. He developed his thoughts
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through philosophical prose, whereas Blake did so in imaginative verse. Rousseau emphasised
the importance of careful social planning, while Blake praised intuition above all things.
Nevertheless, in the context of the development of the 18 th century thought, the two may be seen
as complementary figures: Rousseau analysed the ills of contemporary society as stemming
from a divorce between civilization and the original, innocent state of nature a state he saw as
fundamentally benign. Consequently, he concentrated his efforts on education, seeing childhood
development as continually replaying the change from nature to civilisation. In his work Du
Contract Social (The Social Contract) he proposed to establish a radical political, democratic
position. He opens his book with the famous words: Man is born free and everywhere he is in
chains Essentially, Rousseau saw the need to exchange something of the freedom of original
innocence for a harmonious social contract, while never losing sight of the fundamental, natural
values as a way of holding civilisation.19
Above all, when considering the social context of Romanticism, it is important to bear
in mind the balanced, essentially civilised nature of such a conception of society, as shared by
Blake and Rousseau and deriving from ideas on the fundamental innocence of humanity.
Ambivalence about the nature of innocence in a context of a harsh, exploitative world
becomes more marked when the Songs of Innocence are compared with their counterpart Songs
of Experience. Sleep, darkness and prison are the images Blake chooses to describe the state of
the soul once fallen into the world of experience. He calls this state single vision and Newtons
sleep. By single vision he meant vision which denies the contraries by insisting on the
primacy of fact and reason, reason uninformed by other human faculties and therefore a form of
blindness, reducing everything to the mechanical and material. This seemed to Blake to have
happened to the very soul of England and Western Society with the so called Enlightment of
the seventeenth century and the rising of mechanistic science.
Only a society which has lost its humanity under the veil of reason could have
perpetrated the evils of Blakes times. As we said before, he was deeply concerned with the
exploitation and persecution of children who, generally, were later condemned to slavery in the
mills, and often died there. However, deeper than these abuses seems to be the imposition by
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society on the young (beginning with parents, nurses and caretakers) of the false inauthentic
values of a society living in bad faith. Blake saw the concept of sin as a trap to bind mens
desires, and believed that obedience to a moral code imposed from the outside was against the
spirit of life.
Nowhere in Songs of Experience is this idea best expressed as in The Garden of
Love20. This poem tells the story of an unfortunate fall from Innocence into Experience, during
the course of which the speaker or singers natural sensual impulses become subject to
censorship and prohibition. The songs accompanying illustration depicts the process of social
conditioning whereby this state of affairs is brought about: doctrinal text in hand, priests in
black gowns, representatives of experience, lead youthful maidens in an apparently pious act of
prayer, but the tombstone and open grave toward which the three kneeling figures bend suggests
that the pious act, far from being life-affirming, is in fact a tribute to decay and death. Erecting
tomb-stones where flowers should be in short, religious orthodoxy, according to Blakes
view, replaces the childs world of carefree play with a world of sorrow and subjugation.
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And Thou shalt not, as the inscription that the door of the chapel reads, symbolises
the restriction in peoples free will imposed by religion. What is lost when people lose their
innocence is not any kind of prior wisdom, but liberty, liberty to be oneself and fulfil ones
desire. What is more, there is a kind of forgetting of the sense of atonement, at-one-ment: the
sense of being at home in the world, that moment when there is no clear distinction between
waking and dreaming: the poet feels that priests had bound with briars his joys and desires, in
a way that would be difficult to be himself again.
According to the literary critic Keith Sagar, the stages to free oneself from this single
vision imposed by the forces mature society that Blake so fervently condemns are:
First, to recognise the all-pervading symptoms of single vision as such,
and undertake the psychic journey out of its dark prison. Second, to release the
energies, which, by the damming of their natural channels, have been forced into
destructiveness, for their original creative purposes. Third, to recover innocence,
but a very different, mature, adult, strong innocence possible only on the far side
of experience. And finally to acquire the new vision which becomes available to
man when he has thrown off the mind forgd manacles. () Fourfold vision is
imagination, which is simply how we see when our vision is whole, not
fragmented, how we function when all our subtle senses are fully operational. It is
the divinity of fully realised humanity. 21
It is precisely this fully realised humanity what Blake seeks to convey in the act of
creating such a piece of art as Songs of Innocence and Experience. Among the other poems
present in this collection, we find interesting reflections on the nature of life and Gods
creations. Blake devotes one poem called The lamb 22 from the innocence section to celebrate
the perfect innocent figure of the lamb, together with the simplicity and blind confidence of a
child in his Christian faith. Adjectives such as meek, mild and tender are equally applied
to the lamb, the child and God. However, his need to confront and acknowledge the contrary of
the lamb, made Blake dive into darker waters and the result was The Tyger 23. These lines are
not intended to expound systematic thought, but to convey Blakes sense of awe, and the
difficulty of coping with the contraries when they are at their most mutually exclusive. The
poem has eleven question marks, and is in the interrogative mood throughout. The questions are
all variants of the same question: what god do we have to imagine capable of conceiving of a
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tiger, forging it, grasping the fire, clasping the deadly terrors necessary in the actual creation of
it? What sort of god would even want to create tigers? Certainly not the loving gentle god of the
Christian Tradition. The tigers symmetry is simultaneously fearful and incredibly beautiful. It
is a creature of the forests of the night where sunshine never penetrates; yet it burns brightly
with a fierce flame. Its light incarnate energy.
The deadly dualism which still causes us to divide the divine creation into the
acceptable (cuddly lambs) and the unacceptable (fierce tigers) applies equally to the sphere of
morality, where the more fiery human passions, such as desire, are rejected and degraded as
sins. To Blake nothing natural is evil; but the healing of this dualistic split in the human psyche
requires nothing less than a marriage of heaven (light, the lamb) and hell (darkness, the tiger) in
perfect symmetry. In this way, we can see how, for Blake, the tiger by no means stands for mere
hostility, but for a fluid synthesis of aggression and grace and a full acceptance of the life-
impulse beyond moral judgement 22
Having sailed through the turbulent waters of Blakes poetry, and having tasted not only
his anger and disillusion towards the society of his own times, but also his optimistic endeavour
to open the eyes of his readers towards a new kind of social consciousness, we come to our last
poem which, in a way reflects the state of events in England as seen through the poets eyes.
The poem entitled The Sick Rose presents the reader with a highly symbolic imagery:
The rose is an archetypal symbol, which means that it has been seized on by all cultures which
have known roses as symbolising very much the same range of human experience, and is
spontaneously recognised as doing so even by those who do not know what a symbol is. We are
all aware of the rose as a queen of flowers, beautiful, rich in colour, heady in perfume, sensuous
in texture, incurved, enfolding erotic promise. The last adjective we anticipate is sick.
Sickness, disease, corruption are not only contrary to all the primary meanings of rose, but
strike us as a violation of them, a sacrilege. The two words cancel each other out, leaving a
void, a chaos.25
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26
However, we can also read the rose as the traditional symbol of England as a country, as
a monarchy, which is sick from the excesses, represented as the invisible worm, which are
being perpetrated by her society. Blakes adjective for the worm is invisible, as he considers
the plague which is extending throughout Western Europe has a strongly ideological
component. It is invisible because it deals with ideas and values in a subtle way, by brain-
washing young minds, imposing ideals and norms which do nothing but restrict the freedom of
the English people. Interestingly, we find in this poem the dualism Blake has portrayed
throughout Songs from Innocence and Experience. In The Sick Rose he could come to terms
with the opposition and make it one entity: the poem suggests that all beauty is susceptible to
destruction. It can be read as a reminder that there is a good and evil side to all things - love can
be both joyful and painful, and all life includes a death component.
Conclusion
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In a time of profound and widespread social and political upheaval, the influence of the
Romantics was often considerable. Their involvement could take many forms, but perhaps the
nearest we can get to a common factor is a sense of creative expression shared by so many
romantics across a wide range of genres and styles. Poetry is one of the branches of art through
which these revolutionary artists could vent up their feelings and ideals, creating a style of their
own. Blakes poetry and paintings reflect his subjectivity and his strength in defending what he
thought as one of the most important human values: freedom. His words I must create a system
or be enslaved by another man's show the deep commitment he had towards art and its effect
on society. As the critic Marilyn Butler holds, For Blake, writing is doing, it is both defensive
and aggressive, it is as effective as war in the service of national strength. This is the mood we
find across his creations: his works generally show signs of deep emotional impact, qualities
such as innocence and wonder, child-like sensibilities, extremes of feeling verging on the
insanity, together with a sense of individuality often emphasised together with spiritual, ethical,
psychological and political explorations, usually questioning established views. Blake found the
source of inspiration not in the outside world but in the human mind itself, and to the human
mind and soul of his readers he devoted his work.
If Romanticism was born in opposition and sorrow, in social or national crisis and in
individual trauma, Blake stands as a consequence of the failure of these events to provide a
sense of comfort among society. He spent his artistic life seeking to create a compensating
revolution in hearts and minds, an alternative empire of the imagination27
Notes
1- Blake, William 1757-1827,A Descriptive Catalogue of an exhibition of the works of William
Blake in 1809 - Philadelphia Museum of Art Philadelphia 1939 4to.
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2- My ideas in these paragraphs are taken from the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and
Literary Theory. England, Penguin Reference Books, 1999.
3- Stevens, David.Romanticism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
4- Stevens, David. Op Cit. (Novalis was the pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von
Hardenberg, a German poet, author and philosopher of the early German Romanticism)
5- Butler, Marilyn.Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries. English literature and its background
1760-1830. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981. Introduction.
6- Stevens, David. Op Cit. (Honour, Hugh inRomanticism, 1991)
7- Shelley Byshe Percy.A defense of poetry. Downloaded from:
http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html. February 25th, 2008
8- Gaull, Marilyn.English Romanticism - The Human Context. New York, W W Norton and
Company, 1988.
9- Blake, William. The Little Black Boy. (In Stevens David, Op. Cit.)
10- Butler, Marilyn. Op. Cit.
11- Blake, William inRomanticism, Stevens, David. Op Cit.
12- Blake, William in Hutchings, Kevin. William Blake and the music of the songs.
Romanticism on the net: www.ron.umontreal.ca. Downloaded on 10/02/2008.
13- Cunningham, Allan in Hutchings, Kevin., Op Cit.
14- Blake, William. Auguries of Innocence. Downloaded from:
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/368.html. Downloaded on February 25th, 2008
15- Schiller, Friedrich in Stevens, David, Op Cit.
16- Keith Sagar 2002. Reading Blake. Downloaded from: Romanticism on the net
www.ron.umontreal.ca. Downloaded on 10/02/2008.
17
http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.htmlhttp://www.ron.umontreal.ca/http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/368.htmlhttp://www.ron.umontreal.ca/http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.htmlhttp://www.ron.umontreal.ca/http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/368.htmlhttp://www.ron.umontreal.ca/7/27/2019 To Speak Out Boldly
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17- Saklofske, John. Conscripting Imagination: The National Duty of William Blakes Art.
Downloaded from: Romanticism on the net www.ron.umontreal.ca Downloaded on 10/02/2008.
18- Rousseau, Jean Jacques. He was a philosopher whose political philosophy influenced the
French Revolution and the growth of rationalism.
19- The ideas in this paragraph are based on Stevens, David. Op Cit.
20- Blake, William. The Garden Of Love. Wordsworth, Jonathan and Jessica. The Penguin
Book of Romantic Poetry. London, Penguin Books, 2001.
I went to the Garden of Love
And saw what I never had seen
A chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And Thou shalt not. Writ over the door
So I turnd to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore
And I saw it was filled with gravesAnd tomb-stones where flowers should be
And Priests in black gowns, wee walking their rounds
And binding with briars, my joys and desires
21- Keith Sagar 2002. Reading Blake: The Clod and the Pebble, The Sick Rose, The
Tyger Downloaded from: Romanticism on the net www.ron.umontreal.ca Downloaded on
10/02/2008.
22- Blake, William. The Lamb. Wordsworth, Jonathan and Jessica. Op Cit.
Little lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life and bid thee feed
By the stream and oer the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
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Gave thee such a tender voice
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Little lamb I tell thee,
Little lamb I tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a lamb;
He is meek and he is mild
He became a little child;
I a child and thou a lamb
We are called by his name
Little lamb God bless thee.
Little lamb God bless thee.
23- Blake, William. The Tyger. Wordsworth, Jonathan and Jessica. Op Cit.
Tyger, tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when they heart began to beat,
What dread hand? And what dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
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And waterd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Tyger tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
24- Naranjo, Claudio in Keith Sagar 2002.Reading Blake: The Clod and the Pebble,
The Sick Rose, The Tyger. (Claudio Naranjo is a Chilean-born anthropologist and
psychiatrist who is noted for his inter-disciplinary work with mind-altering substances as well as
the Enneagram of Personality and Gestalt psychotherapy)
25- Keith Sagar, Op Cit.
26- Blake, William. The Sick Rose. Wordsworth, Jonathan and Jessica. Op Cit.
27- Brown, David in Stevens, David Op Cit.
Notes to the Illustrations:
Page 1 - The Bard by John Martin (a romantic vision of a single Welsh bard escaping a
massacre ordered by Edward I of England). Downloaded from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:The_Bard.jpg February 10th, 2008
Page 2 The fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up (1839) J. M.
W. Turner. Downloaded from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ February 10th, 2008
Page 10 Blake, William.Introduction to Songs of Innocence and Experience. Downloaded
from:www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/soi.jpg.February 10th, 2008
Page 12 Blake William. Songs of Innocence and Experience . The Garden of Love.
Downloaded from:www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/garden/garden.jpg. February, 10th, 2008
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Page 15 Blake William. Songs of Innocence and Experience. The Sick Rose. Downloaded
from:www.nwe.ufl.edu/.../ENL2022/BlakeSickRose1.jpg. February, 10th, 2008
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Stevens, David.Romanticism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004
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Hutchings, Kevin. William Blake and the music of the songs. Romanticism on the net:
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