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   akannan Teacher
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   There can be much to suggest that Blake played a defining role in the Romantic Era.  The most persuasive evidence would be that his ideas in both thought and art were prior to any other significant Romantic Poet of the time.  Wordsworth develops his exploration of Romantic thematic concepts after Blake produces his work.  Evidence suggests that a young Wordsworth learned from the older Blake in the former's early years of writing and thought.  Another primary reason how Blake can be seen as an originator of the Romantic movement was that he was immersed in a complex relationship with the preceding intellectual movement of the time, Neoclassicism.  With its strong emphasis on reason and scientific inquiry, Blake was driven to expose the limitations of reason, the complex nature of emotions, and the Romantic ideas of innocence and the transformation of society from what it is to what it can and should be. It is difficult to see other thinkers of this time period engaged with these issues as Blake was.  Due to the fact that Blake spent much of his career wrestling with how his conception of Romanticism fit within a social and intellectual setting dominated by Neoclassicist thought, one can see Blake as a progenitor of the Romantic movement.  The fact that he was misunderstood to a large extent and overlooked during his lifetime indicates that he might have been articulating the vision of a new movement, Romanticism, that had not been sensed at that time.

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   http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/116

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   Posted by akannan on Monday September 7, 2009 at 10:01 AM