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Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss William Blake's illustrated collection of poems, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

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.

Available now

50 minutes

Last on

Thu 23 Jun 2016 21:30

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

READING LIST:

Peter Ackroyd, Blake (Vintage, 1996)

Morris Eaves (ed.), A Cambridge Companion to William Blake (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake鈥檚 Songs and Wordsworth鈥檚 Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge University Press, 1983)

Sarah Haggarty and Jon Mee, William Blake: Songs of Innocence and of Experience - A Reader鈥檚 Guide to Essential Criticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

Zachary Leader, Reading Blake鈥檚 Songs (Routledge & Kegan Paul Books, 1981)

Saree Makdisi, Reading William Blake (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Michael Phillips, William Blake and the Creation of the Songs: From Manuscript to Illuminated Printing (The British Library, 2000)

E. P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Credits

Role Contributor
Presenter Melvyn Bragg
Interviewed Guest Jonathan Bate
Interviewed Guest Sarah Haggarty
Interviewed Guest Jon Mee
Producer Simon Tillotson

Broadcasts

  • Thu 23 Jun 2016 09:00
  • Thu 23 Jun 2016 21:30

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