• Romantic thinkers believe in the overthrow of established social and political systems that repress the human spirit and intellect
• Blake is one of the most radical of the Romantic thinkers
• Blake is especially interested in freeing the passionate emotions which he thinks are repressed by marriage and religious customs.
  
          During the Romantic period, -- William Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Mary Shelley -- four major contributors to the spirit and ideas of the Romantic Period. Of these four, William Blake is the least known and was the least known during his own time. But of the four (and perhaps this has something to do with his relative anonymity), Blake was, perhaps, the most radical thinker and most innovative artist.
  
          In fact, he could be said to be the most perfect English representative of the Romantic period. This period (roughly 1794-1832) is often described as the Age of Revolution. England had just experienced the American Revolution, and the French Revolution had been kicked off on "Bastille Day" (July 14, 1789), a popular uprising against King Louis XVI and his incompetent, abusive French monarchy. Blake (and all the other Romantics) were smitten by the idea of revolution and admired the spirit of freedom which led to it.
  
           In fact, it is actually to France that we can trace one of the first great revolutionary documents, Rousseau's Social Contract (1762) which argued that social, moral, and religious questions should be decided by an appeal to free reason rather than by tradition or authority. His book begins with the rousing sentiment, "Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains."  Here was a philosophy that could kill kings which, as a matter of fact, the French revolutionaries did by beheading King Louis XVI in 1793. This revolution, however, quickly degenerated into a political chaos, becoming ever more violent and extreme until, finally, the nobility were being massacred and thousands of citizens who were suspected of opposing the new "democratic republic" were guillotined by the Jacobins.  Of the Romantics, only William Blake persevered in his French Revolutionary faith.
  
             Both Rousseau in the Social Contract and Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man (a political manifesto against monarchies which earned him great admiration in France but for which he was thrown out of England) express egalitarian political sentiments. They claimed equality for all and rejected the traditional idea that some were born to nobility or chosen by God to rule while most citizens languished in poverty and powerlessness.
  
             These democratic sentiments and impulses to equality caught the imagination and allegiance not only of the poets and artists, but of the common man, as well. For instance, Henrik Steffens, a French boy of the day, recalls that

his father came home one night and gathered him and his brothers and sisters to his chest and with tears of joy told them that the Bastille had fallen, that a new era had begun, that if they were a failure in life they must blame themselves, for henceforth "poverty would vanish, the lowliest would begin the struggle of life on equal terms with the mightiest, with equal arms, on equal ground" (From Crane, Brinton. Decade of Revolution: 1789-1799).

            This impulse fired William Blake's imagination, too. In "Songs of Innocence," Blake's characters are blind to the social injustices of the day; they are "innocent," in Blake's vocabulary.  But in "Songs of Experience," the characters speak from experience and openly rail against their repressed social conditions and their repressed psyches.  See, for instance,  "Holy Thursday" where the speaker rails against the causes of poverty; "The Sick Rose" and "The Garden of Love" where he laments the effects of sexual repression; and "London" which seems to accuse the "church" and "palace" of causing the very distress they pretend to hate.  It is Blake's life project, in general, and the project of "Songs of Innocence and Experience," in particular, to reveal to us the social forces and institutions which maintain and enforce repressive traditions on and within us.

             As an example, look at "The Sick Rose," a poem about how repression of passions in love can make a person sick. Most middle and upper-class marriages during this time were, as you know, financial arrangements between two families, business arrangements meant to economically benefit the future family of the couple. Passion should not motivate marriage and relationships? Passion was suspect and the enemy of Reason.  Reasonable people married for reasonable purposes. But Blake's question was, "what happens to that passion if repressed in love relationships?"  The passion still exists, only now hidden in the dark, "invisible."  Does it secretly fly through the dark, "howling storm," now, however, in the form of a worm coming to infect the "crimson bed of joy," to sicken and destroy the rose.

Other Blake poems which also follow this subject of repressed passions:

"London"
"The Garden of Love"
"The Poison Tree"