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Synopsis

This podcast will help your understanding of Blake’s work by placing it in the context of attitudes to childhood in the late eighteenth century. We will see how poetry for children in the period often sought to make them pious and moral, and to control what were seen as their bad impulses. In contrast, Blake’s work emphasises freedom, imagination, and often refuses to resolve itself with a straightforward ‘message’. We conclude by examining the complex relationship between innocence and experience in two poems from Songs of Innocence: ‘Nurses Song’ and ‘The Chimney Sweeper’.