The Garden of Love: Key Quotes

The Garden of Love: Poet & Context

The Garden of Love was one of the poems in Songs of Experience, one of two books in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Blake was both a poet and an artist, living in the late 18th and early 19th century, a time of significant societal change marked by the Industrial Revolution. His works often critique existing norms and structures, and offer innovative perspectives.
The Garden of Love, together with much of Blake’s work, reveals the poet’s disdain for institutionalised religion and its repression of natural human desires.
Blake focuses on the innocence and joyfulness of childhood, which is often juxtaposed with the corruption, repression, and harshness of the adult world, particularly organized religion and societal pressures. This is clearly evident in The Garden of Love.

Written by William Blake, The Garden of Love is part of Blake’s famous collection Songs of Innocence and Experience.
The work was both a reflection of and a reaction to the societal changes happening around the time. Notably, it was during the rise and continued impact of the Industrial Revolution.
The collection commonly features children and childhood and critiques how society treats, views, and molds them.
As with many other works in the collection, The Garden of Love uses religious imagery to illustrate critical ideas about society, particularly its institutions.

As a Romantic poet, Blake included elements often seen in other works from this period. Namely, a deep appreciation for nature, emotions, and the natural state of humans.
Blake, alongside fellow Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats, rejected the dehumanising effects of industrialisation and the scientific rationalisation of nature, both evident subjects of The Garden of Love.
Central to Blake’s work is the belief in the power of the imagination to create change, a significant theme within Romantic literature as a whole.

Explores the theme of lost innocence and the corruption of natural instincts by society’s structures, notably the Church in The Garden of Love.
Blake critiques the repressive nature of societal structures, and embraces nature and natural instincts as pure and good.
The poem serves as an example of Blake’s belief that children’s innocence is taken away by societal expectations and norms, personified through the image of the church in The Garden of Love.