Redeeming or Silencing the Child’s Voice: Blake and Wordsworth

Abstract

Two of the earliest literary advocates of the child’s perspective as a valuable human and poetic quality, William Blake and William Wordsworth, were strongly influenced by Rousseau in their suggestion that the childlike state of innocence was morally and emotionally superior to the condition of adult experience. They added to that a view of the childlike state as artistically productive. Their chief innovation as writers about childhood lies in their granting the child a first-person literary voice. Both envision the child as capable of significant articulation, which contrasts with the underlying assumption of catechism that the child or infant (coming from the Latin word infans, which means “unable to speak”) has no words of its own. Blake and Wordsworth use the child’s own voice as a rich poetic device and repeatedly denounce catechetical modes of interaction in which the child’s perspective is disregarded. In the work of both poets the child is often injured, but whereas Wordsworth tends to repress the injury, Blake makes it manifest. Using the child as a source of both poetic inspiration and political critique, Blake openly denounces what he sees as institutional and familial oppression. In Wordsworth, on the other hand, the focus is personal and private, retreating from sociopolitical reality into an examination of the child’s interiority, or the child as interiority. Despite the different focus, Blake and Wordsworth share an admiration for what they see as the child’s valuably fresh and distinct subjectivity.