Evaluate WILLIAM BLAKE as a romantic poet?answer in detail

William Blake was a precursor of the Romantic Revival in
England. In his staunch glorification of the imagination, in his revolt against the
bondage and restrictions that society and its institutions imposed on the individual
man, in his mysticism and his symbolic interpretation of thought and feeling and his
simplicity of expression, Blake indeed is a harbinger of romantic poetry in
England.

Romanticism laid considerable stress on the
elements of imagination, nature worship, humanitarianism, liberty, mysticism and
symbolism. It differed from the outlook expounded by the preceding age of Neo-classicism
which promoted the notion of reason, balance and logic with regard to prose and poetry.
The Romantic creed of poetry rests on recording the simple emotions of humanity in a
simple diction.

The poetic creed of William Blake is based
on imagination. He says: “Mental things are alone real; what is called
corporal, nobody knows its dwelling place; it is a fallacy, and its existence an
imposture. Where is the existence out of mind or thought? Where is it, but in the mind
of a fool?” Blake’s nature of work is imaginative or visionary and it is an
endeavor to restore what the Ancients called the “Golden Age”. Blake’s imaginative
faculty is evinced in his concept of God Explained in ‘The Devine image’ where he says
that God is the creative and spiritual power in
man:

“And all must love the human
form.

In heathen, Turk or
Jew;

Where Mercy, Love and Pity
dwell

There God is dwelling
too.”

Blake’s poems are not only visionary but
they also brood over the spiritual freedom or spiritual salvation of mankind. Blake was
greatly affected by the sight of the miseries of the chimney-sweepers and the children
of the Sunday school. In ‘Holy Thursday’ Blake’s sympathetic and compassionate heart
shares the agony of the children and his pent up feelings are let out through an
ironical comment:

“Beneath them sit the aged men
wise guardians of the poor,

Then
cherished pity, lest you drive an angel from your
door.”

The most characteristic feature of
Blake’s poems is that they are based on his ‘visions’. These visions are peopled with
angels, gods and goddesses. Ultimately this implies that the poetic inspiration or
poetry itself is divine and sacred. ‘The Garden of Love’ and ‘The Divine Image’ are the
poems where the poet projects his philosophy of godliness and
divinity.

In Blake’s poems nature is associated with
rejuvenation stimulants such as the sound of the bell in the spring season and the merry
voices of thrush and sparrow. In the ‘The Echoing Green’ it echoes the happiness of the
children:

“The sun does
arise

And make happy the
skies.

The Merry bells
ring

To welcome the
Spring.”

Blake’s poetry is highly symbolic. In
his poems he used such symbols which are to be found even in some of the juvenilia in
‘Poetic Sketches’ to express increasingly subtle and complex intellectual distinctions.
Blake’s symbols are too large and complex to be given in brief. His symbols help to
express his visions which may be obscure to a common reader. In his poems there are
innocence symbols such as children, sheep, wild birds, wild flowers, green fields, dawn,
dew, spring, and associated images, like shepherds, valley, and hills. Then there are
energy symbols such as lions, tigers, wolves, eagles, noon, summer, sun, fire etc. He
had also used sexual symbols, corruption symbol, and oppression
symbols.