The Role Of Suffering In William Blake's Poetry

William Blake is a romantic poet who uses children in his poems to symbolize innocence as they are not tainted by society. He expresses the hardships of child labor and suffering that it comes with due to the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century. William Blake expresses these struggles through the writings of his poems "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience". Some literary critics believe that suffering can come in various ways during each century. Others believe that suffering is only caused by one outcome. Overall, most critics believe that suffering is different throughout each century because of how society changes, as well as the opinions on how people define suffering.
A reviewer, Linda Freedman examined William Blake's poems on suffering and society in the eighteenth century. Freedman writes that in this time period, suffering was due to children being forced to work difficult labor jobs which included dangerous tasks. During this century, children were often used as a way for parents to make money in order to survive and pay for any

Failing over and over again repeatedly was another form that was introduced to be a form of suffering. Stonsy believes suffering happens in each century due to society failing to provide equality among every individual and also failing to improve their mistakes. During the sixteenth century, suffering was happening due to people not having enough money and being unable to buy shelter. Society in the sixteenth century failed to help fix these problems and therefore introduced a new form of suffering. In the nineteenth century, economic problems as well as social and political problems started to occur which caused people to experience a different type of suffering by having feelings of stress as well as feelings of anxiety.