Recommendations
Books Like Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Best books to read after Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake
Readers who love Songs of Innocence and of Experience — Blake's visionary lyrics presenting the world through innocent and experienced perspectives, printed and illustrated by Blake himself — will enjoy these works of visionary poetry, Romantic radicalism, and the great tradition of poetry that operates on multiple levels simultaneously.
- 1Buy
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
by William Blake
The companion work and the best next step after the Songs — Blake's prose poem of diabolical wisdom ('The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom') directly develops the Songs' opposition between innocence and experience into a full philosophical counter-statement to conventional morality.
- 2Buy
The Prelude
by William Wordsworth
Wordsworth's autobiographical epic runs parallel to the Songs — both meditate on the relationship between childhood experience and adult consciousness, but where Blake treats this as a political and theological opposition (innocence vs. experience), Wordsworth treats it as a psychological development (growth of the imagination).
- 3Buy
Lyrical Ballads
by William Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge
The founding collection of English Romantic poetry — published nine years after Songs of Innocence and four years after the combined Songs; reading both together shows the two major modes of Romantic poetry: Wordsworth's naturalistic meditation and Blake's visionary symbolism.
- 4Buy
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
by W.B. Yeats
Yeats is the twentieth-century poet most deeply shaped by Blake — the same visionary intensity, the same mythological system-building, the same conviction that the imagination confronts the spiritual world directly; Yeats's 'The Second Coming' is Blake's 'Tyger' reborn in a post-war world.
- 5Buy
Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman
Whitman's American visionary poem is the democratic heir to Blake's social radicalism — the chimney sweeper and the harlot of London become the enslaved and the laboring in America; Whitman's celebration of the body and the 'multitude' he contains is Blake's vision of liberated humanity.
- 6Buy
Milton: A Poem
by William Blake
Blake's prophetic book in which Milton descends to correct the errors of his earlier work — the most accessible of the longer prophetic books and the best next step after the Songs; shows what Blake's mythological system looks like when fully deployed.
- 7Buy
Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion
by William Blake
Blake's longest and most ambitious prophetic book — the full deployment of the mythological system the Songs only gesture toward; challenging but rewarding for readers who want to understand the complete Blake.
- 8Buy
Howl and Other Poems
by Allen Ginsberg
Ginsberg's founding Beat poem explicitly invokes Blake as its model — the vision of 'the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness' is a twentieth-century version of Blake's chimney sweepers and harlots; Ginsberg literally heard Blake's voice, and the influence is everywhere in Howl.
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