Blake had The Songs of Innocence ready for the public in 1789, the year that Europe was shaken by the French Revolution. That event showed radicals that the old ruling elite could be overthrown and that new styles of government were possible. Yet despite this, his collection can seem unruffled by the outside world. He writes about loving mothers and protective fathers, happy animals and children, greenery and villages. This utopian nostalgia for small community living is, however, the opening salvo in his philippic against the modern world of industry.
The ominous rumblings of anger and protest are heard in ‘The little black boy’, ‘The Chimney Sweep’ and ‘Little boy lost’. This focus on the mistreatment of children is the first overt sign of the revolutionary sentiment which explodes into The Songs of Experience five years later. Here the King, the Church and the industrialists create a dystopia that Blake depicts with poetic energy and horror. And the language he uses in both collections is the language of a poetic radical, a language that refuses to abide by 18th century norms. Children speak some of the poems, the vocabulary is limited, the rhymes simple, the line lengths sing-song.
TS Eliot writing over a hundred years later also finds himself angered at the world. The First World War had shattered the economy and confidence of Britain and he too writes out his spleen in a dystopian picture of London full of half-functioning people. And like Blake the poetry is a radical departure from previous norms - abrupt transitions, constantly shifting line lengths, jarring registers, obscure symbolism.
These poets are two of the most original in the English tradition. The course will study their methods and let us see the ferocity and richness of their poetic vision.