The Violation of Blake's Songs of InnocenceSummary: William Blake's Songs of Innocence contains a group of poetic works that the artist conceptualized as entering into dialogue with each other and with works from its companion work, Songs of Experience. He also viewed each of the poems in Innocence as part of an overall artistic creation encompassed by the poems and the images on the plates he used to print these works. While Blake exercised fanatical control over his publications during his life, after his death his poems became popular and were encountered without the contextual material he intended to accompany them. William Blake was probably more concerned than any other major Romantic author with the process of publication and its implications for the interpretation of his artistic creations. He paid a price for this degree of control over the printing process, however: Blake lived in poverty and artistic obscurity throughout his life. Later, when his poems began to reach a wider audience, they were often stripped of their original context. For William Blake, there was a trade-off between the size of the audience he reached and the degree of control he exercised over the publishing process. Blake didn't just write poems and send them to a publisher; instead, he designed illustrations to accompany his poems, engraved the poem's illustrative works on copper plates, printed the plates on paper, and (when color was desired) colored the pages by hand, then bound the printed pages into volumes to sell. Blake was assisted in much of this work by his wife, Catherine, who was illiterate when he was in the middle of a paper ......990.Hilton, Nelson. “William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience” in The Blackwell Companion to Romanticism. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Online. Internet. February 25, 2000. Available at http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~wblake/SONGS/begin/songs.htmlHirsch, ED, Jr. Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake. Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1964. Keynes, Sir Geoffrey. Introduction to William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. Show the two contrary states of the human soul. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Mason, Michael. Notes to William Blake: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Ed. Michael Mason. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Stauffer, Andrew M. “The First Known Publication of Blake's Poetry in America” in Notes and Queries v43, n1 (March, 1996): 41-43.