SOURCE: Glen, Heather. “Poetic ‘Simplicity’: Blake's Songs and Eighteenth-Century Children's Verse.” In Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, pp. 8-32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

In the following excerpt, Glen traces the similarities between Blake's Songs and the verse appearing in the growing number of books intended for children in the eighteenth century.

Those who are offended with any thing in this book would be offended with the innocence of a child & for the same reason, because it reproaches him with the errors of acquired folly.

(Blake, annotations to Lavater, K [G. L. Keynes (ed.), The Complete Writings of William Blake (Oxford, 1966)] 87)

In one sense, neither Songs of Innocence and of Experience nor Lyrical Ballads are ‘experimental’ collections at all. In their earlier writings, both Blake and Wordsworth had experimented widely with contemporary literary forms—ranging in the one case from the Ossianic prose of some...