A Poison Tree

The Romantic Period of English literature represented a time of literary introspection and experimentation. The writers of this particular period did not call or consider themselves “Romantics”; rather, this term was administered to them. Academics in the 1900s attributed to this collection of writers various traits that they deemed commonalities. This group of Romantic authors was grouped into various “schools,” including the “Lake School,” the “Cockney School,” and the “Satanic School.” Writers of this literary period used the revolution and radical social change taking place around them—whether in the form of the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, or the French Revolution—to spur their work forward. Common attributes of Romantic works include a focus on the common/rustic man, a focus on the individual, a preoccupation with emotional/mental/imaginative states, an interest in the supernatural, and a devotion to writing about the natural world. Though a good portion of writers from the Romantic Period utilize a number of these themes in their writing, that isn’t to say all of them did.

The Romantic period likewise sought to question exactly who can be regarded a poet, and for whom poetry is written. As Wordsworth emphasized in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, poetry was also supposed to be, in his view, the “spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility.” It is this spontaneity of expression that assisted writers in making “similar declarations of artistic independence from inherited precepts, sometimes in a manner involving, paradoxically, a turn from the here-and-now toward a remote, preliterate and primitive past” (The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, vol. D, 8th ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2005, p. 10). Writing within this literary movement, Blake’s work exhibits a focus on the individual in his choice of the lyric form for “A Poison Tree,” and in his subject of emotion as the focal point of the poem.