SOURCE: Bloom, Harold. Introduction to William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, edited by Harold Bloom, pp. 1-28. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

In the following introduction, Bloom discusses Blake's exploration of the ambivalent nature of innocence.

Of the traditional “kinds” of poetry, Blake had attempted pastoral and satire at the very start, in the Poetical Sketches, though the satire there is subtle and tentative. In Tiriel, satire and tragedy are first brought together in a single work by Blake. Songs of Innocence is Blake's closest approach to pure pastoral, but an even subtler form of satire seems to be inherent in these famous visions of a childhood world, as their genesis out of An Island in the Moon might suggest.

Pastoral as a literary form is generally associated with the antithetical relationship of Nature and Art, which on a social level becomes an opposition between country and...