Along with its later companion collection, Songs of Experience, Songs of Innocence represents Blake's most famous work and his third example of illuminated printing. Containing numerous poems that have become standard anthology pieces ("The Lamb," "The Chimney Sweep," "Holy Thursday," etc.), the collection features nineteen poems and twenty-seven illustrative plates.

As Blake intended the terms, "innocence" describes man's state before the Fall; "experience," man's condition after the Fall. Blake scholar Geoffrey Keynes has stated, "The Innocence poems were the products of a mind in a state of innocence and of an imagination unspoiled by stains of worldliness. Public events and private emotions soon converted Innocence into Experience, producing Blake's preoccupation with the problem of Good and Evil."

As in his other illuminated works, Blake intended the visual images to be symbols that would reinforce the text of his poems. Like most of the other poems in Songs of Innocence, the famous poem "The Lamb" has its parallel in Songs of Experience in "The Tyger."