the vantage of children's literature, or against the background of that related and overlapping phenomenon, the tradition of emblematic writing. A whole new world of realities suddenly rises to your sight. And it is endlessly interesting, we could wander in this new world for a long time.
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It is a world inhabited, for example, by that famous and highly influential family, the Taylors of Ongar. The highfalutin imaginations of Coleridge and Southey and Wordsworth shook their heads in melancholy dismay at what they saw as the failed and mad magnificence of Blake's writings. Jane Taylor had no such problems. Just as Blake incorporated (and thereby reinterpreted) Burns's "Address to the Deil" in "The Tyger," Jane Taylor (17831824) did the same to Blake's poem. She answered the famous theological questions of "The Tyger" with the augury of an innocence we have all but forgotten, so serious do we often get, so far do we wander from the pleasure principles laid down in the fields of childhood:
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 | | Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
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| | When the blazing sun is gone,
When he nothing shines upon,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.
("The Star," 1806)
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| | In effect, Taylor is reading Blake's "Tyger" through Blake's "Dream," another text recollected in Taylor's "Star." It is a crucial literary-historical movewhether we are passing through remote areas of our histories or through nearby (and perhaps academic) regions. When Blake added the
Songs of Experience
(in 1794) to the
Songs of Innocence
(1789), he established a critical
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| | "Romantic dialectics": Blake's diad "Innocence" and "Experience" is a version of the dialectic more famously set out in Schiller's "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry" (17951796), and in Wordsworth's distinction between the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'' and "emotion recollected in tranquillity" ("Preface,"
Lyrical Ballads
, 1800). According to these two (subsequently normative) views, contemporary poetrythat is, Romantic poetry"takes its origin from" the "sentimental" or "recollective" elementfrom the self-consciousness that permits a modern poet to recreate "in the mind" "an emotion, similar to" the original "naive" and "spontaneous . . . feelings." That
self-consciousness
, later denominated "Romantic
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