Later in life, William began writing poetry and became a complete artist. He came to believe that poetry and design were the same thing in different forms and he possessed the originality and craftsmanship needed to merge the two.
After executing some small experimental plates in 1788, Blake made the twenty-seven plates of Songs of Innocence. The impulse to produce his poems in this form was partly due to his cast of mind, whereby the life of the imagination was more real to him than the material world.
There is no reason for thinking he had already envisaged a second set of contrary poems embodying Experience. The Innocence poems were products of a mind in the state of innocence and of an imagination unspoiled by stains of worldiness. Public events and private emotions converted Innocence into Experience, producing Blake's preoccupation with the problem of Good and Evil. The combined set, dated 1794, chronicles the growth of imagination passing from Innocence to Experience forseeing the emergence of a higher vision of enlightenment.
