Disorder and Resolution: William Blake’s ‘London’ and William Wordsworth’s ‘London 1802’ by Alex Deamer

In this essay I examine the differing attitudes towards disorder and resolution in William Blake’s ‘London’ and William Wordsworth’s ‘London 1802’. In particular, I suggest that whilst both poems are united by their scathing critiques of late eighteenth-century society, they present divergent understandings of this environment and the means by which to ameliorate its ills. Where Blake’s poem crystallises the class struggle endemic to an increasingly industrial capitalist economy and the consequent urge for revolutionary action, Wordsworth’s sonnet presents a lost yet unified England that must invoke its Miltonic past as a normative guide.