ABSTRACT
William Blake's Songs of Innocence may well have been directly or indirectly suggested to him by Mary Wollstonecraft; they were his contribution to the conflict of ideas in the field of education at the end of the eighteenth century, and to the new thought of which Rousseau was the moving spirit. Two poems first included in Songs of Innocence but later transferred to Songs of Experience are strange narratives, evidently belonging to some world of myth or fairy-tale that yet does not seem to be drawn from any familiar tradition. Many have supposed that the state of Innocence is a state of illusion; that the ignorance of childhood must give place to a more 'realistic' view of life which comes with Experience. One of Blake's most beautiful images is of that idle creature the grasshopper, conventionally contrasted with the parsimonious ant.
