Blake Critical Views Flashcards
Society - Williams
‘criticised his materialist society for blunting imagination’
Spirituality - Thompson
‘Blake was always poor in worldly wealth, always rich in spiritual wealth’
Religion - Norton
‘a significant tool of the ruling class’
Authority - Kutchings
‘Blake’s songs are replete with authority figures who selfishly mistreat the world’
Childhood - Norton
‘religion is active in children’s repression because it makes them promises about the afterlife rather than dealing with the injustices on Earth’
Innocence - Vines
‘Blake’s poems can be analysed as a response to a collapse in human innocence’
Historical context - Collings
‘he lived through the rise of industrialisation, commercialisation and rationalism, he was against all 3’
Reject - Collings
‘he was an outcast, but he seems always to have made a particular effort to cast himself out’
Nature - Marsh
‘repeated emphasis on natural impulses, honesty and freedom in love’
Childhood innocence - Brett
‘the visions of childhood in its joyful innocence were, of course, one of the central themes in Blake’s poetry’
Experience - Gleckner
‘experience is a ravening world of the devourer; an adult world of responsibility, decisions, sex and disease’
Church - Marsh
‘hypocritical institution supporting a corrupt and unjust status quo’
Virtue - Vines
‘virtues that have been corrupted by false religions’
Children, religion and innocence - Fairer
‘children were conspicuously in the church as a symbol of innocence itself, to be exploited by the preacher in appeal for money’
Protest - Thompson
‘Blake is a poet of protest, an enemy of tyranny in all its forms - political, religious and economic’
Simplicity - Bottrall
‘their apparent simplicity has been their chief passport to popularity’
Divinity and imagination - Gilchrist
‘whose playthings were the sun, moon, the stars, the heavens and the earth’
