Themes Flashcards
Innocent cannot last forever unchallenged. It is under inevitable threat as we move into adulthood; however Blake suggests that this is a much worse fall than needs be. We make it worse on a political level through the rule of moral law and ethic punishment rather than what?
forgiveness at the religious level
What are the two way in which we can hear the famous phrase from London of “mind-forg’d manacles”?
we can either interpret this as in the ‘minds’ that forge these manacles are the minds of other people; when we observe the inhumanity of urban life we are seeing the imposition of some people’s will upon others, or to put it antler way, we are witnessing the suppression of healthy individual life by an ideology comprised of work, power and repression. But it is true that it is our mind that places these shackles upon us
In London Blake refers to “mind forg’d manacles” which shows us the processes of internalisation by means of which…?
we absorb these forces inside outselves and accept them without question, an accent which kills off the all-important development of the imagination inside us
It is important to see Blake as a Romantic poet, others such as Coleridge and Wordsworth shared Blake’s distrust of the forces abroad in contemporary society, what did they detect?
an increasing mechanisation in the world around them, and they too recommend a reconsideration of a more innocent state as part of the solution to the problem
Blake’s poetry considers much more detail in the description of everyday city life, such as in London, in comparison to his contemporaries like Wordswoth and Coleridge, why?
this is of course because of his lower social class in which he was under considerably greater pressure to earn his living than any of them.
Blake lived where his whole life?
London
Blake had sympathy for which 1 movements?
the American and French revolution
How does Blake interpret the American and French revolutions to which his symapthies lay?
he saw them as a decisive stroke for the freedom and emancipation of the human spirit
Blake was, we may say, an instinctive radical with a natural opposition to tyranny wherever he found it and a distrust in kings priests or even in the very idea of ___________who rules human affairs.
monolithic deity (God created the world)
The years in which Blake wrote were ones of enormous change in Britain. We speak now of the ‘industrial revolution’ while Blake, living in London, did not see a great deal of this first hand however was highly and imaginateltveiy aware of how the overall economy of the country was changing and particularly what?
how social life was becoming increasingly subservient to the demands of wage labour and the new rules of life enjoined by the factory system
How did Blake view the social changes inherent with the industrial revolution?
he believed it was a state attempt to restrict human capacity and the freedom of the imagination and saw his role as contributing to the reinstatement of the imagination as the guiding principle of human affairs
To an extent certainly we may seem in terms of the larger movement we refer to as “”?
Romanticism
Blake’s political sense was profound but at the same time he say these moments of strife against a far wider and deeper background, and thus his poetry attains a cosmic dimension in which individual human battle are always seen as examples of what?
of a perennial (infinite) battle between the expanding force of energy and the restrictive numbing force of reason
How does Blake describe his poem collection?
as there being “two contrary states of the human soul”,
Blake uncovers the corruption of innocence which links to the prevailant Christian ideas about the nature of humanity itself and between the pre Lapsarian state and the subsequent life of hardship. What is a pre-Lapsarian state?
this is the Fall of man
