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British Romantic Poetry

For many scholars, Blake marks the beginning of British Romanticism, a literary period spanning the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Blake had a visionary approach to poetry that made a significant aesthetic and philosophical departure from the more genteel paradigm of eighteenth-century verse. His singular poetry initiated a shift that would continue in the work of the period’s other key poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. Admittedly, there’s no simple way to summarize the diversity represented by these poets. However, it is possible to note two broad trends that characterized the Romantic era. For one thing, Romantic writers generally favored intuition over rationality. They also emphasized the expression of emotion over the communication of didactic messages. Shelley famously encapsulated both these trends in his essay, “A Defence of Poetry” (1840), which pits philosophical reason against poetic imagination. Whereas reason emphasizes the differences between things, imagination underscores “the similitudes of things.” As such, the poetic imagination is an intuitive form of expression that reveals the underlying unity of the world. In “The Tyger,” Blake traces how his speaker follows an intuitive line of questioning to make sense of the origin of wickedness.

The Revolutionary Spirit of the Late Eighteenth Century

Blake wrote “The Tyger” at a time of great political upheaval. This period of upheaval started with the American Revolutionary War, which began in 1775 and resulted in the Declaration of Independence the following year. Blake nurtured a long-standing hatred of monarchical authority, so the American push for democracy resonated with him profoundly. It also resonated with others in England. This shared enthusiasm for democracy became clear during the Gordon Riots of June 1780, which in part protested the Crown’s ongoing attempt to defeat the newly formed United States. Revolutionary fervor flared up again nine years later, when the storming of the Bastille in Paris inaugurated the French Revolution. The Haitian Revolution against imperial France would follow in 1791. The common thread in each of these revolutionary moments was the desire to overthrow oppressive authorities—a desire that Blake clearly reflected in poems such as America (1793) and Europe (1794). Though less obviously political in their intent, the poems of Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) were composed in the same period of upheaval. Regarding “The Tyger,” Blake reflects the time’s spirit of antiauthoritarian resistance through the speaker’s relentless questioning.

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