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William Blake, born 28 November 1757, was an English poet and painter.

His siblings died at a very young age and because of this he started having visions.

He learned to write and read at home and he was send at age ten to a drawing school.

In 1782 he got married.

He worked as an engraver until the day of his death,12 August 1827.

In 1789 he published his literary masterpiece "Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience".

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of poems divided in two different parts.

The first one is about childhood and innocence, not immune to the fallen world and its institutions.

The second part, on the contrary, is about the world of adulthood full of sins, inhibitions and corruption.

These two sides reflect the two parts that inhabit the human soul at the same time, a dichotomy.

Songs of innocence is a collection of 19 poems.

This collection mainly shows happy, innocent perception in pastoral harmony, but at times subtly shows the dangers of this naive and vulnerable state.

The poem is about Christianity. The lamb is a common metaphor for Jesus Christ, who is also called "The Lamb of God".

There are two stanzas: in the first stanza, the speaker asks the lamb who his creator is;

the answer is at the end of the poem. Here we find a physical description of the lamb, seen as a pure and gentle creature. In the second stanza, the lamb is compared with the infant Jesus, as well as between the lamb and the speaker's soul. In the last two lines the speaker identifies the creator: God.

The Tyger" is the sister poem to "The Lamb" (from "Songs of Innocence"), a reflection of similar ideas from a different perspective.

"The Tyger" presents a duality between aesthetic beauty and primal ferocity, and Blake believes that to see one, the hand that created "The Lamb", one must also see the other, the hand that created "The Tyger”.

Frankenstein

Frankenstein was published in 1818 anonymously.

Mary was helped by her husband Percy while writing the novel.

Frankenstein is written in the form of a frame story that starts with Captain Robert Walton writing letters to his sister. It takes place at an unspecified time in the 18th century.

Dr Frankenstein is a brilliant scientist,who is obsessed with the idea of gaining control over life and death, refusing the limits of contemporary science.

He carries out his research alone and unaided until he eventually succeeds in bringing to life a monster he has created out of the organs of dead men.

However, even Frankenstein is frightened when he sees the fruit of his insane fantasy. The monster escapes from the laboratory but he is rejected by all men.

The monster escapes to the North Pole, in order to not kill anyone.

Dr Frankenstein follows him to kill his creation but it is the doctor himself who is mortally wounded by the monster. He accuses Dr Frankenstein and the rest of mankind of lacking all compassion. The story ends with the monster being borne away on an ice raft in the Arctic sea.

The themes are:

-The dream of the creation of artificial life;

-The isolation of the individual by society;

-Gothic Horror.

The Tyger

The Lamb

Romanticism

Romanticism was an intellectual, historical, artistic and literary period, which was born at the end of 18th century in Germany with the Sturm Und Drang movement. Later it became popular in all Europe especially in French, Italy an finally in England, which was expanded with the idea of cemeterial poetry

William Blake

Songs of Innocence

Mary Shelley

She was born in 1797, her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the feminist Mary Wallstonecraft.

His father gave her a rich education.

mary began a romance with Percy Shelley who was already married.

With him she left for France, when they come back, she was pregnant.

The couple got married only after the suicide of Percy's first wife.

When they were in Switzerland, Mary had the idea for her novel Frankenstein.

In 1822, Percy drowned in Viareggio.

After this Mary began her career as a novelist, she died at the age of 53 due to brain cancer.

Songs of Experience

It is a collection of 26 poems, Blake uses the simple structure of short, lyrical poems to subtly question and criticise the practices of his society.

The End

Romanticism