William Blake wrote and illustrated Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
Blake was both a poet and a visual artist, and he designed the collection as an integrated work of words and images. Rather than treating illustrations as separate decoration, he created illuminated pages in which poems, lettering and artwork work together. He used relief etching, then hand-coloured the printed pages, so surviving copies can differ noticeably from one another.
Songs of Innocence first appeared as a separate collection in 1789. Songs of Experience followed, and Blake combined the two in 1794 under the longer title Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. The paired books contrast childhood innocence with experience, oppression, social injustice and the darker effects of adulthood.
Famous poems include “The Lamb,” “The Chimney Sweeper,” “London” and “The Tyger.” Blake’s unusual combination of poetry, printmaking and painting made the volume an important example of the artist’s book and helped establish his distinctive place in British Romantic literature.