CONTEXT

 

But to understand the poem better, we have to know more about the context, the period in which Blake writes it, that coincides with the romantic period.                                          

Romanticism has its roots in the middle ages. The romanticism was partly a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature in art and literature. It stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature. It elevated folk art, nature and custom, as well as arguing for an epistemology based on nature, which included human activity conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage.

Recurring themes found in Romantic literature are the criticism of the past, emphasis on women and children, and respect for nature.

Romanticism in British literature developed in a different form slightly later, mostly associated with the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose co-authored book "Lyrical Ballads" (1798) sought to reject Augustan poetry in favour of more direct speech derived from folk traditions.

William Blake is the most extreme example of the Romantic sensibility in Britain.

The time of the romantics is the present. They were obsessioned with the past. This timelessness enters in conflict with the time that they are living.

The American separation from the British Colonies is the most important for the romantics. Was a revolutionary moment for thinking, acting…

Both movements are revolutionary.

 

POETS OF THE TIME-.

 

In Blake we find these 2 groups:

 

1-    The Revolutionary: Shelley, Byron, Keats.

2-    The Conservative: Coleridge, Wordsworth.

 

Blake has been called revolutionary poet. At the same time, as a big contradiction, he supported the French revolution; he accepted the equal rights of any individual, irrespective the race, the sex or believes.

The Bible is the big reference for Blake.

 

Coleridge contributed to the romantic thinking, art. The back bound for romantic theory are produced by Coleridge.

 

The other 3 (Shelley, Byron and Keats) are the spirit of the romantics.

They are eccentric, egocentric, revolutionary, libertarian, etc. they broke with society; they travel around the world. They were heroic in some way and unconscious of the suffering of the other.

They were convinced that we can make whatever we want.

So, Blake’s nineteenth-century editors were poets or poetasters with their own ideas of poetic diction and structure.

 

But, in addition to this romantic period, we have to know why Blake chooses that theme to write, that is to say, why he writes about black people.

The poem is written in 1789, published in “Songs of Innocence”.

It is written in a period in which the question of race had a big importance.

The poem is controversial as it was published during a time when slavery was still legal and the campaign for the abolition of slavery was still young.

Blake questions conventions of the time with basic Christian morality.

 

This is a period in which it is becoming important the question of “abolitionism”.

Abolitionism is a political movement that seeks to end the practice of slavery and the worldwide slave trade.                                                                                                  

By the eighteenth century, black slaves began to be brought into London and Edinburgh as personal servants. They were not bought or sold, and their legal status was unclear until 1772.

By 1783, an anti-slavery movement was beginning among the British public. That year the first English abolitionist organization was founded by a group of Quakers.

 

In William Blake’s time, the black represented the evil.

William Blake was against slavery (inhuman). But still there is an error. He still considered that the white were the correct.

It is good to be black as well as you can adopt our style of life.