Irony in William Blake’s Poetry

Irony in William Blake’s Poetry

Denizer Bozkurt, Serap

Irony, stating something meaning another, turns into a philosophical method of understanding opposite concepts with Friedrich Schlegel’s Fragments published in the eighteenth century. It accords irony an ontological and epistemological function and changes its scope. William Blake, one of the prominent names of Romantic poetry, employs the binary oppositions and creates a different perspective of irony. In addition to the usage of traditional binary systems such as; good and evil, heaven and hell, he structures new binary systems. The traditional binary systems used by Blake are challenging as he redefines the opposite concepts in a holistic manner. On analyzing these three poems; “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, “The Tyger” and “The Lamb” it would be fair to claim that he presents a different perspective of construing the world with the employment of irony using integrative binary oppositions in the Romantic period. Keywords: romantic poetry, irony, William Blake

Article
PeerReviewed

International Burch University

2016-05-25

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