Blake's Vision

Paper Summary:

This paper reviews poet William Blake's sense of the state of mankind and how this sense is reflected throughout his work. The paper focuses on three main aspects of Blake's collective work that envelope his idea of humanism which, to Blake, encompassed energy, reason, desire and ultimately vision.

From the Paper:

"Writing against the backdrop of what has come to be known as the Romantic Period, William Blake reflects in his poetry on the readjustment of the economic, social, and political realities of an industrial age. "Turbulent" barely begins to describe this period in English history, in which the country transformed from a primarily agricultural society to a modern industrial nation. Both the American and French revolutions were taking place, and the traditional social structures were being threatened. Blake, like many other young, radical Englishmen of the time, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, believed that the universal violence that had been predicted in the Bible was being enacted, that the apocalypse was coming (Abrams, 60). Essentially, they sensed that there was something distinctive about the time they were living in, that there was "the spirit of the age," releasing energy, boldness, and creative power. In other words, it was the perfect time for a literary renaissance (Abrams, 5)."

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