Childhood in Poetry

As part of the "discovery" or "invention" of childhood in the eighteenth century associated with the interest in early education shown by Locke, Rousseau, and the Sunday School movement, the decades before the Songs saw the genre of short collections of devotional and moral poems for children emerge as a "most prolific and controversial literary form" (Shrimpton 22). The genre's mainstay was Isaac Watts's Divine and Moral Songs Attempted in easy Language, for the Use of …

…own various pronouncements -- those on the equivalence of Christ and imagination not least. In annotations written around the time of Innocence, Blake argues that "our Lord is the word of God" (E 599), but also that "the Poetic Genius ... is the Lord" (E 603). The "acquired folly" which innocence challenges concerns especially religious ceremony, tedious hymns, and conventional theology, and their want of perception for that energetic, spiritual and intellectual vision which exists in no sense.