SOURCE: Mee, Jon. “William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience.” In A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake, edited by David Womersley, pp. 402-07. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000.

In the following excerpt, Mee discusses the relationship between Blake's work and the poetry of his contemporaries.

William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience certainly ranks among the most distinctive and individual collections of poetry in a century obsessed with originality and genius. It was not even published in a conventional way. Songs began life as an exercise in self-publishing, and never reached an audience in Blake's lifetime beyond those few collectors who bought copies printed by the author himself. Without mentioning Blake, the successful bookseller James Lackington noted in his 1792 Memoirs (224) that several authors had tried to sell their own works in order to by-pass the book trade. Blake went further than most and attempted to exploit...