ABSTRACT
Blake was scarcely known to his contemporaries as an author, and, among those who did so know him, it was largely poets and his friends who relished his poetry. His first poems were printed in 1783, but no comment on them, public or private, is known until B.H.Malkin reprinted, in his Father’s Memoirs of his Child (1806), Blake’s ‘How Sweet I Roamed’ and ‘I Love the Jocund Dance’ from Poetical Sketches (1783), ‘Laughing Song’, ‘Holy Thursday’, and ‘The Divine Image’ from Songs of Innocence (1789), and ‘The Tyger’ from Songs of Experience (1794). Most of the reviewers of Malkin’s book remarked impatiently upon the poetry which he had given, (a) For example, the Literary Journal for 1806 said:
