By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Poets have written well about innocence, but the flipside to the Romantic apotheosis of childlike innocence is the more grounded acceptance of human experience, and the values of living, struggling, and facing life’s challenges. So below, we’ve gathered together some of the finest poems about experience of various kinds.
William Blake, ‘The Tyger’.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?