Ut pictura poesis: The verbal-visual synthesis in William Blake's poetic worldview

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to William Blake’s self-illustrated poems and investigates the verbal-visual synthesis in his worldview manifestation. It is hypothesized that verbal and visual representations made a demand for each other as they reflected unified embodied conceptualizations. The purpose of this study was to examine how different modalities increased a variety of ways in which the poet could interpret his own experience and represent his vision of the Universe. The findings showed that hybrid representation of Blake’s poetic worldview resulted in the increased salience of relevant information, more varied imagery and its more elaborate encoding.