William Blake
Quick answer: William Blake craft guide for poets: contrary pairs, simple metres carrying visionary weight, and symbols that grow, with the best poems to start on.
Blake wrote poems a child can chant and scholars still argue about. 'The Tyger' has been recited by generations who never notice they are handling questions about creation and evil, because the surface is a nursery rhyme and the depths are bottomless. That double life, simple vessel, enormous cargo, is the most useful thing a poet can learn from him.
Engraver, painter and visionary, Blake made his books by hand, etching text and image together. He sold almost nothing in his lifetime. Few reputations in English poetry have risen further after death.
The poem
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake, 'The Tyger' (1794)
Who Blake was
William Blake (1757-1827) trained as an engraver in London and spent his life there, producing illuminated books that combined his poems with his own hand-coloured designs. Songs of Innocence appeared in 1789, joined in 1794 by Songs of Experience to form a single double collection.
He matters as the first great Romantic in England and as poetry's supreme example of an artist who built a private mythology and made it public property.
The signature moves
Blake's craft looks simple and is anything but.
- Contrary pairs: poems written twice, once from innocence and once from experience, 'The Lamb' answered by 'The Tyger', two poems titled 'The Chimney Sweeper', so the collection argues with itself.
- Ballad and hymn metres bent to visionary use: four-beat lines and simple rhymes carrying content no hymn would touch.
- The question as engine: whole poems built from unanswered questions that accumulate pressure instead of information.
- Repetition as incantation: repeated words and grammatical frames that push a lyric towards ritual, as in the opening and closing stanzas of 'The Tyger', which return with one devastating word changed.
What you can learn from him
Write your next poem twice: once in a voice that trusts the world and once in a voice that does not, then publish them as a pair and let readers stand in the gap. This is cheaper than irony and more honest.
Use the plainest metre you know for your strangest material; the contrast generates the charge. Try a poem made only of questions. And when you repeat a stanza, change a single word on its return, because that one substitution can carry the entire poem's judgement.
Where to start reading
Begin with the short lyrics before the long prophetic books.
- The Tyger and The Lamb, read as a pair
- London, four stanzas of compressed social fury
- The Chimney Sweeper, both versions
- Auguries of Innocence, for the world in a grain of sand
- The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, when you want the full visionary voltage
What poets can take from this
- Write the same scene from an innocent voice and an experienced one.
- Set disturbing content in a metre borrowed from nursery rhyme or hymn.
- Draft a poem that asks at least seven questions and answers none.
- Repeat your opening stanza at the end with exactly one word changed.
- Choose one symbol, a rose, a wall, a lamb, and let it darken as the poem proceeds.
Try it yourself
Pick a city street you know well and write its 'innocence' poem and its 'experience' poem: same street, same details, two irreconcilable ways of seeing.
Questions
What are Songs of Innocence and of Experience?
Blake's paired collections of 1789 and 1794, showing what he called the two contrary states of the human soul. Many poems in one book answer a poem in the other.
Was Blake recognised in his lifetime?
Barely. He sold few copies of his hand-made illuminated books and was dismissed by many contemporaries. His stature grew through the nineteenth century and he is now central to the canon.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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