Blake Critical Views Flashcards
(19 cards)
B - Williams
‘criticised his materialist society for blunting imagination’
B - Thompson (spirituality)
‘Blake was always poor in worldly wealth, always rich in spiritual wealth’
B - Norton (religion)
‘a significant tool of the ruling class’
B - Kutchings
‘Blake’s songs are replete with authority figures who selfishly mistreat the world’
B - Norton (childhood)
‘religion is active in children’s repression because it makes them promises about the afterlife rather than dealing with the injustices on Earth’
B - Vines
‘Blake’s poems can be analysed as a response to a collapse in human innocence’
B - Collings (context)
‘he lived through the rise of industrialisation, commercialisation and rationalism, he was against all 3’
B - Collings (outcast)
‘he was an outcast, but he seems always to have made a particular effort to cast himself out’
B - Marsh (nature)
‘repeated emphasis on natural impulses, honesty and freedom in love’
B - Brett
‘the visions of childhood in its joyful innocence were, of course, one of the central themes in Blake’s poetry’
B - Gleckner
‘experience is a ravening world of the devourer; an adult world of responsibility, decisions, sex and disease’
B - Marsh (church)
‘hypocritical institution supporting a corrupt and unjust status quo’
B - Thompson (protest)
‘Blake is a poet of protest, an enemy of tyranny in all its forms - political, religious and economic’
B - Bottrall
‘their apparent simplicity has been their chief passport to popularity’
B - Gilchrist
‘whose playthings were the sun, moon, the stars, the heavens and the earth’
How may Feminist literary theory apply to the work of Blake?
Does not challenge gender roles, typically displays female features as subordinate to male
How may Marxist theory apply to the work of Blake?
He presents social commentary and insight into the human condition. The effects of growing industrialisation and capitalism on the lives of the working people
B - Currie
‘what the songs never allow us to forget is how vulnerable children are’
B - Akroyd
‘Blake was the last great religious poet in England’
