Songs of Experience: Introduction 1794 - 1825

William Blake created this page from "Songs of Experience" using relief etching, a technique he innovated. It's a print, but each one is unique because he hand-colored them with watercolor. Notice how Blake combines text and image, framing his poem with a celestial scene. The words themselves seem to emerge from the starry sky, underscoring the poem's themes of divine inspiration and the earthly realm. Blake's method allowed him to control every aspect of the page, blurring the lines between printing, painting, and poetry. He saw them as inseparable. Blake was deeply critical of industrialization and mass production. His artistic choices reflect a desire to return to a more handmade, individual mode of creation, one that valued imagination and spiritual insight over mechanical efficiency. In this way, his prints stand as a protest against the growing alienation of labor in his time.