Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1990

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Edward W. Bratton

Committee Members

Nancy Goslee, Bob Leggett, Dorothy Habel

Abstract

This study is based upon the assumption that Blake and Wordsworth considered imaginative perception as a defining feature of their work, that they emphasized its significance for living one's life fully, and that they used their lyric structures as catalysts for developing their readers' creative perceptions. The general aims of my analysis are to reveal the powerful similarities between Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads and Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience in their heuristic intention, affective form, and rhetorical effect. Both Wordsworth and Blake structure their lyrics to effect an imaginative change in their readers. Wordsworth's strategies are characterized by suspensions which occur in the texts on three levels: between his companion or Lucy poems, within the dialogue of characters, and within the rhetoric of the poem itself. Similarly, Blake evokes suspension between companion poems of Innocence/Experience, poems of dialogue within Experience, and rhetorically dialogic forces at work within the single lyric, typified by "London." Finally, attentive readers of these texts can be enabled to participate in the affective structures so carefully shaped by the authors.

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