BLAKE CRITIC QUOTES

A.Gilchrist
Called him a "divine child" "whose playthings were the sun, moon,
the stars, the heavens and the earth."

Coote
(MOHAH) is "the first sustained example of free verse in English
suggests how the tyranny of rhyme and metre is only one of the
many constricts now to be thrown off."

David Punt:
'London' is "the most concisely violent assault on 'Establishment
thinking' that English poetry has produced."

Evans
In Blake's simpler poems "wisdom speaks with the voice of a child"

Margaret Bottrall
"Their apparent simplicity has been their chief passport to
popularity" "They repay pondering, investigation and analysis"

Oliver Punsal
"(Innocence) is a state which can be obtained again following a
period of experience."

Raymond Williams
Blake "criticised his materialistic society for blunting imagination."

Timothy Vines
"Blake's poems can be analyzed as a response to a collapse in
human innocence"

T.S.Elliot
the poems suppress "explanatory or connecting matter."

T.S.Elliot #2
"It is merely a peculiar honesty, which, in a world too frightened to
be honest, is peculiarly terrifying."
William Blake
"Man has the essence of God in himself"

William Blake #2
"I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's"

William Blake #3
"Without contraries (there) is no progression...all are necessary to
human existence"

According to Pagliaro, Blake considered the world “death-laden,

filled with intimidating foes, deadly Tygers, hypocritical smiles,
and constricting social and religious systems that reduce life.” The
critic believes it was the aim of the Songs to meet the challenge
presented by such a dismal world view.

Denis Saurat – “religious rebel”

“That which can be made Explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.

“celebrating rather than censuring, as was conventional, the child’s

capacity for imagination, invention and play” – Heather Glen

“The tiger is a self-conscious exercise in the eighteenth-century

language of the ‘sublime’. – Steven Vine

introduction to experience, - Edward Larrissy – Bard as a ‘prophet-

turned priest” miserably promulgating an ideology of sin and
lapse.

“London is one of the fiercest and most troubled lyrics of political

protest in English poetry”- Steven Vine

George Orwell:
“There is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in
a poem like ‘I wander through each charted street’ than in three-
quarters of Socialist literature”