Songs of Innocence and of Experience - William Blake

Excerpt from Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul
I793 Blake's Outlook on life had changed, as the two visions composed in the meantime Show. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (about I790) written in prose, is a series Of aphorisms and Visions which attack orthodoxy and common sense. The seeming world around us is an illusion of our senses, which from their very nature cannot communicate true knowledge. According to this poem all true knowledge is intuitive. Hence intuition and instinct are good and right but the moral law, with its insistence on the repression of original sin and natural desire, is evil and false. The French Revolution, Book I, a prose poem, is a visionary history Of the beginning of the French revolution, which shows Blake's sympathy with the aims of the revolutionists. Blake associated with the British revolutionists, - Dr. Price, William Godwin, Tom Paine, Holcroft, and others, - at the house of Johnson the publisher during the years 1791-2. He became an extreme individualist, self-su icing and self-satisfied. He regarded natural impulse, which he called imagination or energy, as goodness and morality and duty as fetters which enchain the soul of mankind that forged them.
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