ROMANTIC IMAGINATION

William Blake

The notion of Romantic imagination can be defined as a threshold between the literary
approach intended during the eighteen century, and the one brought about by Romanticism.
Whereas the English Romantics account for the imagination as an indispensable component
in the process of creation, the Enlightenment (the Age of Reason) gives imagination very
little importance, since for them it is the judgment that governs.

Imagination stands for the creational faculty of the Romantics' admiration,

representing the empowering source of both the poem and the poet. Thus, the artist’s mission
can be understood as the duty to offer to the common mankind an insight into the essence of
our existence, basing on the fact that he enjoys a greater knowledge of the human nature, and
implicitly, of the world.

William Blake was is an important figure of the Romantic age, being largely
identified through his two contrasting collections of poems: “Songs of Innocence” and
“Songs of Experience”. By means of these two literary works, Blake exposes his imaginative
thought, as he, in the position of the creator, is able to distinguish beyond this “earthly”
existence, but at the same time, to give an account of reality.

Blake’s works are characterized by a religious spiritual component, as he transposes

his religious side and beliefs into his creation. He considers God and imagination as being the
same, because God is regarded as the creative essence inside each and every man, and
moreover when coming to the poet.

The Romantic poet is a “man speaking to men”(Corneanu 1), capable of unfolding a

relevant kind of truth. Blake heavily relies on his work on the use of intelligible symbols, to
clarify for us, the readers, the incomprehensible nature of life. At the same time, he counts on
the value of paradoxes, parallelism, and irony sometimes, in order to be able to mirror the
expression of his attitudes and visions, regarding the paradoxical character of our existence in
this world. This idea is emphasized in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: The Argument”:
“Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and
hate, are necessary to -human existence”(Blake qtd. in Corneanu 1) . His mission as a poet, in
general, represents a “romantic irony”(Paris-Popa 1), as he has to be both “creative and
critical”, namely he must write related to the real world, although his work is fictional.

In the poem “The Divine Image” Blake claims that: “For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and
Love /Is God, our father dear, / And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love / Is Man, his child, and
care.” (Blake 5-8). The virtues he attributes to both God and Man reveal humanity’s divine
character, outlining the association between God and imagination. As imagination is a faculty
of creation, Blake depicts in “The Tyger” God’s measureless power of creation: “Did he who
made the Lamb make thee?”(Blake 20). In this poem, the Romantic poet is wondering
whether God, who created the lamb, a sign of innocence and purity, is also responsible for the
tyger’s existence, namely the existence of evil in the world.

Imagination appears to be able to reveal the essence of childhood but through a

childlike vision of life. In this regard, one can observe the method Blake used when creating
the poem “The Lamb”. It gives the impression as if a child were talking to a lamb as if the
poem were a riddle, through which Blake acknowledges the association between the lamb
and the child. He defines this stage of our existence as the ultimate expression of divine
purity, as the lamb is a Biblical symbol for Jesus (therefore the incarnation of Jesus into a
child). Blake uses his imagination to designate symbols, meant to be the basis for rebuilding
his spiritual experiences, drawn from reality.

Similarly, in the poem “The Tyger”, Blake focuses his imaginative vision on the
changes coming once with our growing-up: as mature people, we lose our innocence and we
can no longer deny the existence of evil in the world. Thus the author expresses his reality
relying on words and images, as he confesses in “A Vision of the Last Judgement”: “Vision
or Imagination is a Representation of What Eternally Exists, Really and
Unchangeable”(Corneanu 1).

Blake’s contrasting imaginative visions upon the spiritual order of our life are
mirrored in “The Divine Image” (“Songs of Innocence”) and his antithetical correspondent,
“The Human Abstract”(“Songs of Experience”). In both of them attributes as pity, love, and
mercy are in the spotlight, but whereas in the former they are presented as divine virtues, in
the latter, they are regarded as “virtues of delight”(Blake 3), but in an ironical sense. They are
attached to both God and man, but in “The Human Abstract” the poet relies on irony so as to
entail the idea of humanity being limited by its own weakness and imperfection. Through
these two poems, the world of innocence is described as being opposed to that of experience,
since once with maturity, human nature loses quality and our way of perceiving the world
changes. As an example love is this time referred to as “selfish love”(Blake 6), being the
product of fear:” Pity would be no more,/ If we did not make somebody Poor:/And Mercy no
more could be,/ If all were as happy as we;”.(Blake 1-4).

Also, the empowering character of Romantic imagination is encountered in Blake’s

poems “Infant Joy” and “Infant Sorrow”, that count for his inclination towards the unity of
contraries. In both works, he imagines the birth of a child, although from two different
perspectives. While in the poem from “Songs of Experience”, the baby is imagined as
experiencing a feeling of captivity, therefore struggling to escape, and his parents attitude
betrays their sorrow for having to accept this cruel reality for their child, in “Infant Joy” what
prevails is the feeling of happiness; moreover, the mother chooses “Joy” as name for her
child:”Sweet joy I call thee;”(Blake 9). In conclusion, the coming in this world of a baby can
be regarded either from an optimistic, innocent or a pessimistic, mature point of view,
depending on our account of reality. The poet is again revealing, through symbolic
representations, the puzzling nature of our existence.

In closing, the mission of the Romantic poet is governed by the imaginative capacity
he is endowed with, in comparison to the ordinary man, being capable of seeing beyond the
visible world.

Works cited:

Blake, William. The Divine Image. Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation.

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43656/the-divine-image. Accessed 3 June 2019.

Blake, William. Infant Joy. Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43665/infant-joy Accessed 3 June 2019.

Blake, William. The Human Abstract. Songs of Experience. The Poetical Works.
Bartleby. www.bartleby.com/235/87.html. Accessed 3 June 2019.
 Blake, William. from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: The Argument. Poetry
Foundation. Poetry Foundation. www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91425/the-marriage-of-
heaven-and-hell-the-argument. Accessed 3 June 2019.

Blake, William. The Tyger. Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation.

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger. Accessed 3 June 2019.

Corneanu. Imagination and Vision. University of Bucharest, 13 May 2019.

Corneanu. Poetry and the Poet. University of Bucharest, 6 May 2019.

Cumberlege, Geoffrey. The Romantic Imagination. Oxford University Place, London,

1949, pp 1-50. archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.72367. Accessed 3 June 2019.

Paris-Popa, Andreea. New Criticism. University of Bucharest, 4 March 2019.