Separated by centuries, races, national identities and countless literary movements, the English poet and artist William Blake and the Nigerian poet and playwright Wole Soyinka still find points in common in their writings. They have a sort of thematic overlap; both Blake and Soyinka address the issue of race in their poems "The Little Black Boy" and "Telephone Conversation" respectively. The first describes the story of an African child who comes to the profound awareness that only after death can the different human races be equal. This last poem aptly describes a telephone conversation between a white landlady and an African man who recently moved to England. “The Little Black Boy” was published in 1789 while “Telephone Conversation” was initially published in 1960. The poems intertwine despite their historical separation and therefore interact with history in similar ways. “The Little Black Boy” and “Telephone Conversation,” while varying considerably in rhythm, rhyme, and syntax, share the questioning tone, racial imagery, and dialogic speech acts that unite figures of innocence with those of experience. This polymerization creates an innocence/experience binary that allows the poems to generate meaning in a similar way. Each resists the thematic topos of their time in order to didactically reframe the question of racial equality in a pre- and post-civil rights era. Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience are songs first and foremost. They are also “Christian poems, and are often consciously didactic” (Bottrall 180). William Blake deals with history in many of his poems, its effect usually subtle and religious. It is his use of epigrammatic moments that casts a wider net. What makes Blake unique is his identity as... middle of paper... all of them engage with an epigrammatic moment in history, one in the 1780s and the other in the 1760s, and show that before - and after the affirmation of civil rights, a system of power still exists. In each poem, the story receives new life, new experience. Each directs the didactic and experiential attitude towards the story by subverting the stereotype of black inexperience. Works Cited Bentley Jr., GE The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT:Yale UP, 2001. Print.Bottrall, Margaret. William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience. London: Macmillin,1989. Print.Jones, Eldred Durosimi. Wole Soyinka. New York: Twayne, 1973. Print.Maduakor, Obi. Wole Soyinka: An Introduction to His Writings. New York: Garland, 1986. Print. Wilson, Kathleen. The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century.London: Routledge, 2003. Print.