Transition and system

Abstract

The developing concept of Innocence can be traced in Blake’s work from the early shepherds’ songs and the lyrics of An Island in the Moon to the great engraved book of around 1789 and the complex monologues for the little black boy and the chimney sweeper. In some of the lyrics that Blake engraved for the 1789 volume, however, the celebration of Innocence begins to modulate into a more explicit questioning of intellectual error and social injustice. The profound and complex changes which took place in Blake’s mind and vision during the early 1790s had religious, political and sexual dimensions; and they found literary expression in printed and manuscript poems and in a series of non-lyrical engraved books. In this context the writing of additional lyrics for Songs of Innocence led naturally to the formulation of plans for a new engraved book in which the voices of Innocence would be answered by contrasting voices expressive of resentment, delusion, and prophetic indignation. By 1794 Blake was ready to engrave the title page for this new volume and the frontispiece and title page for its second part; and by about 1795 Songs of Innocence and Experience was an apparently completed work, although it still lacked ‘To Tirzah’.