Which Romantic poet wrote 'The Garden of Love'?

Which Romantic poet wrote “The Garden of Love”? William Blake wrote it.

Blake published “The Garden of Love” in Songs of Experience, the 1794 companion volume to Songs of Innocence. The poem revisits a place where the speaker once played freely, only to find that a chapel has been built there and that the landscape is now marked by graves, restrictions, and “binding briars.”

The garden is often read as a symbol of natural joy and human freedom being constrained by organised religion. Blake’s criticism is not simply an attack on private faith; it targets institutions and moral systems that, in his view, suppress desire, imagination, and spontaneous life. The poem’s shift from a once-open green to a controlled and mournful space captures that transformation.

Readers sometimes confuse Blake with Wordsworth because both are central English Romantic poets who wrote about nature. Blake’s poetry, however, is typically more symbolic, visionary, and sharply critical of church and social authority. “The Garden of Love” belongs unmistakably to Blake’s paired Innocence-and-Experience project.