SOURCE: A review of Vision and Verse in William Blake, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. LXVI, July, 1967, pp. 461-63.

In the following review, Nurmi assesses the success of Ostriker's metrical analysis in Vision and Verse in William Blake, revealing the limitations of her technique.

The analyst of Blake's prosody, in dealing with almost any of his lyrics after Poetical Sketches, operates under more than the usual handicaps, because the sound of the poems can only with great difficulty be directly connected with the meaning. In a symbolic poem like “The Tyger” especially, the sound is hard to associate with anything but the surface meaning of the words, and the surface meaning is only the starting point. A subtle prosodic study of the poem could be conducted within the limits of what we are given in the text, to show us how the sound patterns help...