Romantic Love and Innocence: Blake's "The Garden of Love" and Burns's "Ae Fond Kiss"

The late eighteenth century saw a revolution in how poets understood love, desire, and the self. William Blake and Robert Burns, though radically different in style and temperament, both challenged the institutions — the Church, social convention, class hierarchy — that sought to regulate human feeling. Blake's "The Garden of Love" is a fierce allegory of institutional repression; Burns's "Ae Fond Kiss" is an achingly personal farewell. Together, they demonstrate how Romantic-era poets turned love poetry from a literary exercise into a vehicle for social critique and authentic emotional expression.

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Blake: "The Garden of Love"

Context

William Blake (1757–1827) was a poet, painter, and visionary whose work was almost entirely ignored in his lifetime. "The Garden of Love" appears in Songs of Experience (1794), the companion volume to Songs of Innocence (1789). Together, the two collections present "two contrary states of the human soul" — innocence as a state of joyful freedom, experience as a state of repression, disillusionment, and suffering.