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In Chapter 6 , a historicist deep-dive into “Infant Sorrow” (SE) reveals how the perspectivism that underlies Blake’s cognitive metaphors operates in the world of Experience. The result is what we might call, with apologies to Malebranche, the Vision in Hell. In forming a conceptual metaphor, “Infant Sorrow” shows, the mind weaves together different strands of its cultural and physical situation even as it is, itself, subject to the collective social results of similar such weavings. Here, the suffocating density of Blake’s own historicism, grounded in highly compacted allusions, threatens to turn reading-as-weaving into a Gordian Knot liable to forestall the possibility of change. The poem portends an apocalypse of self-awareness so horrifying it demands some ethical response: the passing of a Last Judgment able to make the moment pass so that life can go on. Thereby, “Infant Sorrow” revives longstanding liberal-academic anxieties over what actual benefit literary-critical interpretation serves in the wider world beyond the poem.

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Small Room for Judgment: Geometry and Prolepsis in “Infant Sorrow”

  • 章节

  • 发表日期：

    2026年

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  • Andrew M. Cooper

摘要

In Chapter 6 , a historicist deep-dive into “Infant Sorrow” (SE) reveals how the perspectivism that underlies Blake’s cognitive metaphors operates in the world of Experience. The result is what we might call, with apologies to Malebranche, the Vision in Hell. In forming a conceptual metaphor, “Infant Sorrow” shows, the mind weaves together different strands of its cultural and physical situation even as it is, itself, subject to the collective social results of similar such weavings. Here, the suffocating density of Blake’s own historicism, grounded in highly compacted allusions, threatens to turn reading-as-weaving into a Gordian Knot liable to forestall the possibility of change. The poem portends an apocalypse of self-awareness so horrifying it demands some ethical response: the passing of a Last Judgment able to make the moment pass so that life can go on. Thereby, “Infant Sorrow” revives longstanding liberal-academic anxieties over what actual benefit literary-critical interpretation serves in the wider world beyond the poem.