5. Questions and Answers

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we think about the Blake’s habit of asking questions, focusing in particular on: (i) the category of the rhetorical question in poems such as ‘On Another’s Sorrow’; (ii) the structural relationship between questions and answers over the course of the collection, e.g. in ‘The Lamb’ and ‘The Tyger’; (iii) ‘The Tyger’ as a series of deepening questions.

Course

In this course, Dr Ross Wilson (University of Cambridge) explores William Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’. We begin in the first module by thinking about the historical, political and cultural context in which Blake was writing. After that, we think about the theme of opposites in Blake’s poetry, focusing in particular on the connection between conflict and progress and the use of oppositions as a structuring device for his poetry. In the third module, we turn from opposites to likenesses, thinking about the similarities and differences between different versions of the same poem, as well as the idea of likeness in Romantic poetry more generally. In the fourth module, we explore the ‘soundscape’ of Blake’s poetry, before moving on in the fifth module to consider the ways in which Blake uses his poetry to pose and answer challenging questions. Finally, in the sixth module, we think about Blake’s views on Christianity and religion more broadly.

Lecturer

Ross Wilson was born in Salford and brought up in north Manchester, where he attended Philips High School and Bury College. He was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and University College London before completing his doctorate at Cambridge in 2004. He held a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel (2004-7) and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Faculty of English, Cambridge (2007-9) before being appointed to a lectureship in Literature in the School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2009. He returned to Cambridge in 2013 as Lecturer in Criticism in the Faculty of English and took up a fellowship at Trinity College. He is editor of Romantic Circles Reviews & Receptions and very occasionally tweets @RossWilso . In 2015-16 he is the Crausaz Wordsworth Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities.