Exploring Blake's legacy and the myth of Icarus

• Blake

Blake's early life and work

He was born in London in 1757 and he didn’t attend a regular cours of studies. He started to write poems in his lifetime but he didn’t publish them. When he died in 1827 he was working on Dante’s Inferno. He created a particular technique called “illuminated printing” that is he reproduced poems and illustrations on copper.

The title of his masterpiece was “Songs of Innocence” and “songs of experience” composed in 1794.

Blake's poetic philosophy

Blake was convinced that not only the meaning of a world was important, but also the sound. He used a simple style and an ordinary vocabulary. He believe in the coexistence of the opposites and he wanted to read a poem taken one from “Songs of innocence” and the other one taken from “Songs of Experience”.
For example he associated the “lamb” to childhood, to innocence; on the contrary he choose the “tiger” to describe manhood, a period in which the man lost his purity.

In his poems he used assonance, alliterations, rhymes and so on to give musicality to his lines.

Blake was a forerunner of Romantic Age, because he believed that to achieve knowledge, it was necessary the coexistence of opposites.

• The myth of Icarus

The myth of Icarus

In Greek mythologies he was the son of Daedalus who built him wax wings to escape from the labyrinth. Unfortunately he flew too near the sun and he fell in Aegean sea.