ABSTRACT
“The Tyger” is undoubtedly one of the most famous and most loved of Blake's poems, fragments of which have reverberated through popular culture for at least a century. The phrases “fearful symmetry” and “burning bright” alone are the titles of more than a dozen books, films, television episodes, and comic books, whereas “Tyger, Tyger”, or “Tiger, Tiger”, is the name of anything from coffee bars and restaurants to karaoke booths and retailers of Buddhist charms and pendants. The appropriation of the Blake brand is, of course, frequently little more than opportunistic marketing as inconsequential as the Charles Dickens pubs found around the world from London to Melbourne, or William Shakespeare gift shops, but such Tyger-related paraphernalia is only one of the most evident signs of the diffusion of this much-anthologized poem throughout popular culture. The popularity of “The Tyger” was not solely a twentieth-century phenomenon, unlike the reception of many others of Blake's works. It was one of the few poems to have made some impression on the poet's contemporaries during his lifetime, being reprinted in Benjamin Heath Malkin's A Father's Memoirs, translated by Henry Crabb Robinson for the Vaterländisches Museum, and appearing in Alan Cunningham's Life shortly after Blake's death. Charles Lamb thought it “glorious” (BR 394), and Dorothy and William Wordsworth copied the poem along with several other of Blake's songs into a commonplace book, although William Beckford made a note in his copy of Malkin that the lines of Blake's verse were stolen “from the walls of bedlam” (BR 571), whereas Coleridge's final judgment was “I am perplexed—and have no opinion” (Bentley 2004, 353).
