William Blake Research Paper

William Blake, a bastion of English Romantic Poetry, has several archetypical elements of this period that can be found throughout his work. The foremost of these being opposition towards conventions of society and the church. In his early life Blake became a devout Christian that studied the bible intensively. This can be seen reflected in his early works which are vaguely reminiscent of psalms. He studied at Westminster Abbey and while there was tormented by a group of boys so ferociously that on one occasion he pushed one of them off of a scaffold. After he left the abbey he studied under a man named Reynolds. He came to detest Reynolds search for “general beauty” and his discourses on abstraction being the glory of the human mind. Several of Blake's poems are written almost as retorts to …show more content…
Some time after this he attended dinner at the house of a woman he was in the process of courting, during the course of which he recounted the story of his last romance which culminated in the refusal of his wedding proposal. When the dinner was over he asked this woman if she pitied him to which she responded affirmatively. He replied to this by saying, then I love you. This belief in the correlation of seemingly unrelated emotion appears in several of his works. The influences of Blake’s early career are generally ones that conform to the Romantic archetype: the belief that man is innately good, however as his career progresses his works and influences become progressively more negative. He loses his belief in man’s righteousness and so does his work, for instance this can be seen in the book authored by Blake entitled Songs of Innocence and Experience. In which he expounds on the belief of man’s inherent goodness in songs of Innocence. He, in Songs of Experience, writes a retort to this stating that the aforementioned ideas are in fact false and that man is not as pure as he would

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