Deckard 1
James Deckard
Prothro
Block 3
ECCR
3 – 22 – 2010
The Impact and Ideas of William Blake
William Blake’s literary impact on the Romantic Movement was tremendously
significant. William Blake made one of the largest individual poetic contributions to the
Romantic Movement. Blake’s ideas are evident in several of the later Romantic Movement era
poets’ work, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Jonathan Keats. Despite William Blake’s
brilliant ideas, many Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, as well as Jonathan Keats
disagree with a few of them. William Blake heavily influenced the Romantic poets with
recurring themes of good and evil, heaven and hell, knowledge and innocence, in addition to
external versus inner reality.
William Blake is, without a doubt, one of the most significant individuals in England’s
cultural history. Before the Romantic Movement, a lot of the writers, such as Alexander Pope,
wrote more for structure instead of for content. Blake, on the other hand, turned back to the style
of his Elizabethan predecessors as well as early seventeenth century poets, by writing more for
the content of the work. Blake’s contributions to the Romantic Movement are not only limited to
poetry. William Blake also illustrated for the works of his peers, painted, engraved, and did
relief etching.
Deckard 2
Many of the themes that William Blake utilized throughout his works are evident
throughout the Romantic Movement. His ideas are often found in the works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and Jonathan Keats. The two poets both have the same views as William Blake on
nature. All three of the poets discuss nature in their works, in some form or another, in a
multitude of ways.
William Blake, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge both state in various poems that the
cleanliness of the individual’s spirit is contaminated over time by the conundrum that is the
outside world. Both agree that a child grows farther from innocence with age and becomes
entangled with fear and obscurity which is the most prominent aspect of both poets. William
