BASC70041 - William Blake Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Course Description

To create a little flower is the labour of ages.
Damn.Braces:Bless relaxes.
          (Marriage, Plate 9)

Energy is Eternal Delight
          (Marriage, Plate 4)

William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, two of his Illuminated Books, are of indissolubly conjoined form. Blake willed them as One: poetry, engraving and hand-painting. Apparently simple, they are in fact startling and complex. They are live, revolutionarily iconoclastic in form and content, beautiful, provocative.

Blake created the first Songs of Innocence editions and these two works between 1789 - 1794, in wracked epoch of war, revolution, industrialization; religious, political, philosophical, social and cultural uproar in England and the World. Blake addresses nearly all.

Using splendid Oxford facsimile editions, we will thrill to their aesthetic richnesses of sound and image - that conjoined content. And grapple - as Blake did - their giant subjects: contraries and contrarieties - of human psychology and politics, oppression and affirmation, identity, sexuality, hope and despair, slavery and freedom, Eternity and Time, that William Blake’s vision, intellect and independence take on.