Innocence and Experience: Introduction to Blake

Eric Donald Hirsch, Jr. (born March 22, 1928) is an American educator and academic literary critic. Now retired, he was until recently the University Professor of Education and Humanities and the Linden Kent Memorial Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Virginia. He is best known for his writings about cultural literacy.Hirsch began his academic career as a Yale English professor and a scholar of the romantic poets. His first book, Wordsworth and Schelling (1960), was a comparative study of the Romantic or "Enthusiastic" mindset, adapted from his Yale dissertation. His second book, Innocence and Experience (1964), was a monograph on William Blake. Hirsch argued, contra Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom, that Blake's outlook changed markedly from the time when he wrote the Songs of Innocence to the time when he wrote the Songs of Experience, and that the Songs of Experience represent a reply to the earlier work and a satire of his earlier views. The book was awarded the Explicator Prize but its thesis provoked criticism from Blake scholars who had followed Frye's lead in developing systematic interpretations of a more-or-less static Blake.