Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss William Blake's collection of illustrated poems "Songs of Innocence and of Experience." He published Songs of Innocence first in 1789 with five hand-coloured copies and, five years later, with additional Songs of Experience poems and the explanatory phrase "Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul." Blake drew on the street ballads and improving children's rhymes of the time, exploring the open and optimistic outlook of early childhood with the darker and more cynical outlook of adult life, in which symbols such as the Lamb belong to innocence and the Tyger to experience.

With

Sir Jonathan Bate
Provost of Worcester College, University of Oxford

Sarah Haggarty
Lecturer at the Faculty of English and Fellow of Queens' College, University of Cambridge

And

Jon Mee
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York

Producer: Simon Tillotson.