From topoi to dialectic: the progression of invention techniques the poetry of William Blake

Abstract

Because of William Blake's lack of formal education, his poetry is usually not considered "rhetorical." This dissertation attempts to show his progression from the use of topoi to dialectical oppositions for inventional devices in creating his poetry. Chapter I surveys rhetorics possible in Blake's thinking, including the rhetorics of Plato, Isocrates, Gorgias, Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, Ramus, Talon. In addition, the introduction briefly outlines the relationships of rhetoric to dialectic and to poetic. Chapter II surveys the eighteenth-century rhetorics of the elocutionary, philosophical-psychological, and neo-classical movements, with special emphasis on the neo-classical rhetoric text by John Holmes. The second half of this chapter analyzes Blake's four season poems from Poetical Sketches for topoi and figures of speech. Chapter III is a survey of criticism which covers the concept of dialectic and contraries in The Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Chapter IV compares the dialogues of The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion to those in Plato's Gorgias, and it reveals examples of M. M. Bakhtin's dialogic language and Julia Kristeva's nondisjunctive characters in Thel. Chapter V concludes the dissertation with a survey of inventional devices evident in Blake's poetry and possible avenues of further study.