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Word-Image Intertwining: William Blake’s Illuminated Poetry and the Aesthetics of Compositeness
Bowen Wang
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2021.06.001
Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
From ut pictura poesis to intermediality, the close, interactive, and complicated relationship between poetry and painting has been an inevitable subject under discussion throughout the historiography of literature and fine art. Different approaches and interpretations to/on their sisterhood could come to a broad spectrum of interartistic ideas and practices. William Blake, an English Romantic poet, painter, and printmaker, links word and image by his invention of relief etching, or more understandably, the illuminated painting which juxtaposes his verse with in-text illustrations simultaneously on the same page. His technical strategy has already implied a dynamic and dialectical interrelation between word and image, like the treatment of earlier medieval manuscripts, yet in a more innovative rather than decorative manner. This article, therefore, through a comparative analysis of both Blake’s verbal and visual representations, will first attempt to clarify two distinct modes of combining poetic language with visualisation vis-à-vis form and content, and then critically investigate how this word-image interaction can be used to reflect the poet’s Romantic thought about sociocultural changes and provide new possibilities of reading, interpretation, and aesthetic complexity in that specific epoch.
William Blake, illuminated poetry, Romantic poetics, aesthetics of compositeness, word and image
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, June 2021, Vol. 11, No. 6, 375-387
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