GENDER, RACE AND SLAVERY IN THE SELECT POEMS OF WILLIAM BLAKE

Besides characterizing the themes of supernatural or imaginative elements, grandeur in natural beauty, and witnessing the beginnings of the sustained British imperial expansion, the Romantic period (1798-1850) also witnessed slavery and racial dominance. The criticism of the slave trade at this age was at its most intense state, finally leading to the formal abolition of the trade in 1807. Between 1680 and 1783, more than two million African slaves were transported to the British colonies alone. Many prominent writers and poets, and several lesser-known authors, expressed opposition to the slave trade through their works. Particularly, poetry became a tool to strengthen abolitionist beliefs and a method to agitate political values. Poets like William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Samuel Coleridge used their literature to fuel abolition. Abolition of slavery was accomplished through the literature of these multiple English writers who took the responsibility and duty of voicing the slaves of their time. This paper examines the relationship between the poetry of William Blake and the notions of slavery in the Romantic era. The poems "The Little Black Boy" (1789) and “The Visions of the Daughters of Albion” (1793) express sympathy with this movement, depicting racial prejudice and oppression in severe ways. However, other aspects of the poems threaten to undercut this message, such as the equation of corruption with black imagery and purity with white imagery. This is a sign of Blake's limited scientific and theological understanding of race, which leads to an inadequate portrayal of the enslaved.