The Poems of William Blake

The Poems of William Blake Capitalization

You may have noticed, when reading the poetry of William Blake, that there is a lot of odd capitalization of letters throughout his work. During the time Blake was writing poetry, it was a common practice of the Classicists to capitalize different words in an attempt to give abstract qualities to a specific classical reference. In other words, by capitalizing a word or phrase in the middle of a line or stanza was an indicator or key to the reader that the word is part literary allusion to something else. In some arguments, the more capital letters ascribed, the better the poet because this meant he was able to draw more references to Classical mythology and other literary works.