William Blake’s “The Little Girl Lost” and “The Litle Girl Found”: Songs of Innocence or of Experience?

Abstract

Nowadays, one of the major themes of the blakean studies is the interaction of poetry, printmaking and painting in his illuminated books. In this essay, we will focus our attention on the poems "The Little Girl Lost" and "The Little Girl Found", originally published in Songs of Innocence, illuminated poems that later migrated to the volume of Songs of Experience. Methodologically, we will present an interpretation of Blake’s composite art, emphasizing how different arts are produced in the plates of his illuminated books. For this analysis, we will use the copy of G of Songs of Innocence and copy L of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, format not available in the Brazilian editions, only centered in the textual dimension of Blake’s art.