Songs of Innocence and of Experience

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2016

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss William Blake's collection of illustrated poems "Songs of Innocence and of Experience." He published Songs of Innocence first in 1789 with five hand-coloured copies and, five years later, with additional Songs of Experience poems and the explanatory phrase "Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul." Blake drew on the street ballads and improving children's rhymes of the time, exploring the open and optimistic outlook of early childhood with the darker and more cynical outlook of adult life, in which symbols such as the Lamb belong to innocence and the Tyger to experience.

With

Sir Jonathan Bate Provost of Worcester College, University of Oxford

Sarah Haggarty Lecturer at the Faculty of English and Fellow of Queens' College, University of Cambridge

And

Jon Mee Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for news about in our time and for
0:05.0	recommendations about our archive, please follow us on Twitter at BBC in Our Time.
0:10.0	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:12.0	Hello, the artist and poet William Blake published songs of innocence in 1789,
0:17.0	the year of the French Revolution, he was 32.
0:20.0	Five years later he added songs of experience and from that point produced them together
0:24.4	in the volume we have today.
0:26.1	Together the songs entertain themes such as childhood, education, free will, free love
0:31.0	and the role of established religion, all in lines of apparent simplicity.
0:35.6	And we know them now for some of the best loved poems in the English language such as
0:38.9	Tiger, Tiger, The Sick Rose and London.
0:42.0	In Blake's lifetime, though, these poems were largely unknown, partly as he made only 50 copies,
0:46.7	each coloured painstakingly by hand and circulated by friends like Coleridge and Wordsworth.
0:51.2	And his death in 1827 Blake was known for his art, not for his poetry.
0:56.0	With me to discuss William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience,
1:00.0	As Sir Jonathan Bait, Provost of Worcester College University of Oxford,
1:03.4	Sarah Hagertie, lecturer at the Faculty of English and Fellow of Queens College
1:07.5	Cambridge and John Me, Professor of 18th Century Studies at the University of York.
1:12.3	Jonathan Bates, what was William Blake's early life like?
1:15.0	Well, it's very important to remember that Blake came from a rather different background from the other famous
1:21.6	romantic, Wordsworth and Coleridge. He didn't go to
1:24.8	university, so he's a Londoner through and through. Born in Soho, the son of
	...

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