jan 1, 1789 - Blake self-publishes 'Songs of Innocence' and 'The Book of Thel'

Description:

Thel and Songs of Innocence display increased sophistication and complexity. Of Songs Akroyd writes: “he may have hoped to make this fortune out of it, with its pastel shades and its images of children and nurses, it looks as typically Georgian as a Wedgwood teas-set or a Hepplewhite chair” (119).

However, Akroyd goes on to say,
[The Songs] were not quite right for the age—‘wild’ and ‘mystical,’ with an old-fashioned Gothic appearance that was not acceptable to connoisseurs. They seem to us now to express all the energy and confidence of a poet who has at last found his way forward; Songs of Innocence has the obliquity of ‘An Island in the Moon,’ the spirituality of Thel, the dramatic directness of Tiriel, and the melodic control of Poetical Sketches, all working together to form a complete and coherent statement. And yet B.’s contemporaries were partly right: there is something ‘wild’ about these highly compressed and concentrated lyrics. At first glance, they might have seemed aspects of amenable pastoralism (he even deliberately copied Stothard’s soft style in a few images) but there is an intensity in the words and designs that sets them apart from the more agreeable work of his contemporaries. The verse is part of the design, the design part of the verse, in an extraordinarily condensed and almost ritualistic way; the visual completeness, the insistent meters, the impersonal skill of the calligraphy, turn these poems into achieved works of art that seem to resist conventional interpretation. The sense of energy and intensity within such taught bounds leads also to an awareness of possible loss of control and disequilibrium; that is why the tight meters and formal concentration of the poems seem actively to exclude the reader and the world. Blake protects the sources of his inspiration very carefully, and there is always a suggestion of distance and even parody within the most apparently ‘naïve’ lyrics; they resemble the man himself, who could be cryptic or maddeningly oblique when he felt himself to be challenged. (Blake 122)

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