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The Great Task : Prosody And Songs Of Innocence, Biff Faunce

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

While eschewing a strict definition on the didacticism of Blake's imaginative vision, the following four analyses could be said to revolve around three general themes. These are: (1) that Songs of Innocence engage in a dialectic, much of their appeal deriving from the tension created between the co-existence of so-called qualities of "innocence" and "experience"; (2) that each one is an individual attempt to reconcile these, as well as other, oppositions; and (3) that such a reconciliation is hierarchical, usually concluding on a transcendent or visionary plane. The first three center on the text and metrical phenomena. In "The Ecchoing …