What does Blake mean by ‘experience?’ Since a prevailing definitive feature of consciousness is experience, I posit an answer by situating his Songs of Innocence and of Experience between Bloom and company's version of Romantic consciousness, and current approaches to consciousness. Together, the models span the gamut of possible relations between mind and world, and thus offer useful frames for thinking about Blakean experience. Briefly, whereas Bloom et al. took for granted human consciousness's divorce from nature and likely alienation from the world, today, ecological approaches to consciousness situate it within a necessary relationality to that world that amounts to a cognitive partnership with the environment and others. What was an abyss between nature and consciousness, is now an ecology, and what is striking beyond the conceptual whiplash is the fact that what was absence is now the constitutive presence that is our cognitive system. The declining fortunes of the subject and of individuality have increased our faith in relationality and ecology, but has the pendulum swung too far? In the Songs, Blake explores through innatism and panpsychism the shifting boundary between mind and world that is entailed in experience, and in the process teaches us about the limits of porousness and relationality. Since both consciousness and ideology – what Blake refers to as ‘mind-forged manacles’ – have a stream-like immersive feel, Blake warns that the porousness of consciousness cannot be a necessary good. He thus turns to a range of prepositions to question the givenness of one's relationality towards the world.

For Bloom and company, Romantic consciousness became a hard problem insofar as it entails an estrangement from nature, mandating a new, iconoclastic map of the mind (Bloom 3, 147). In this view, the imagination can ‘sustain its own integrity’ or yield to ‘the illusive beauty of nature’ (5). Any autonomy purchased by this version of consciousness was at the cost of the social self (6), and underscored both the precarity and the achievement of Romantic art. For de Man, ‘nostalgia’ was the only bridge between Romantic nature and consciousness, a pathological fusion of matter and imagination that cedes consciousness ‘to the realities of the object’ (70). The object ‘marks instead a possibility for consciousness to exist entirely by and for itself, independently of all relationship with the outside world, without being moved by an intent aimed at a part of this world’ (76–7).