Teaching Reading with Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Teaching Reading with Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Blake entered the Romantic canon with the appraisal of his later prophetic poems. Not surprisingly, his canonization led to the relegation of the earlier SIE to the periphery of Blake industry. There were attempts to reread SIE and to endow positive meaning to Innocence, notably by Leader, Glen, and Gardener. Their quite persuasive readings of SI, however, failed to convince the mainstream Blake criticism because their revaluation of Innocence requires abandoning the dialectical schema from Innocence to Experience and then to Organized Innocence. I believe that this schema is a premature synthesis which necessarily skews Blake's comprehensiveness. Blake did not write SE to retract SI; SE is added to SI for the same purpose of "rousing the faculties to act." SE is different from SI only in that it focuses more exclusively on the "errors" of the Enlightenment. Innocence is operative throughout Blake's poetic career; it is an active principle with which readers engage with Blake's poems to become the agents of their own redemption.