The emotionality of William Blake's poems: a quantitative comparison of Songs of Innocence with Songs of Experience

Analyses of the words contained in William Blake's Songs of Experience and Songs of Innocence with the new Dictionary of Affect, a tool listing the pleasantness, activation, and imagery of several thousand words, indicated that the Innocence poems were both more pleasant and more active than the Experience poems. On the whole, both sets of poems were richly imaged, rather pleasant in tone, and more emotional than both normative English and the work of Blake's Romantic contemporaries.