ABSTRACT
Alicia Ostriker's study of William Blake's prosody is too much devoted to the prosody at the expense of the vision; Blake is perhaps the worst choice for a study such as this. Anne K. Mellor's book-length study uncovers what she believes to be a contradiction between Blake's rejection of reason and the body and his acceptance of definite outline in art. This contradiction exists only if one believes as Mellor does that Blake rejected the human body and the necessity of giving form to the moral world--two very questionable assumptions. In Poetic Form in Blake's Milton, Charles James Fox argues for a poetic structure in Milton as profound as its thematic structure. This hypothesis may be questionable, though certainly not as questionable as Mellor's, but it does not restrict Fox's discussion of Milton in the way Mellor's hypothesis restricts her discussion.
