Page:The Poems of William Blake (Shepherd, 1887).djvu/12

x this way should have failed to attract the attention of an age which chose Whitehead for its Poet Laureate, which applauded the mediocrities of Darwin and Hayley, and which refused to read or to buy the Lyrical Ballads in ordinary "hot-pressed twelves."

To William Blake must, however, be accorded the merit of having been the first to lead back English poetry to that simplicity and nature from which the school of Pope and his feeble imitators had so widely departed. Already in 1783, he had printed for circulation among his friends a tiny volume of verses written in very early youth, and containing, among other things, six songs characterized by a power of lyrical feeling and expression of which no poet had given evidence for more than a century. As these poems were all written by Blake before he had attained his one-and-twentieth year in 1777, we may fairly call him the precursor not only of Wordsworth, whom he preceded by fully fifteen years, but also of Cowper and of Burns, With respect to the first of these the fact is all the more remarkable on account of the general resemblance in tone and style, the similarities of subject and metre between the Songs of Innocence and of Experience published in 1789-1794 and the earlier poems of Wordsworth,