There Is No William Blake Rhetorical Analysis

In his essay “There Is No William Blake”, Roger Whitson argues that through algorithms and extensive study of writers, we are able to recreate work that perfectly mirrors the exact writing styles of writers like Blake and Dickinson. Through code explanations and analysis of his William Blake twitter bot, Whitson appeals to a lot of readers and he presents robust evidence of the importance of why creation of literature and art influences advanced thinking. In other portions of his essay, he seems to lack the ability to have his audience engaged to all the points that he wants to convey. In a brief moment of his essay, Whitson discusses how we aren’t always aware of how influential and innovative the art that we create is. He states, “If Romantic scholars don’t know what our own writing does when it is transformed into code, we certainly don’t know what Blake’s words are capable of doing outside

It is clear that his work and interest in Blake’s work comes from interests in both computer science and literature; but at times that served as a blind spot for him rather than serve as something that could aid in keeping his audience interested throughout the essay. Whenever he spoke about the coding and programming portion of his work with his twitter bot, he described terms and concept in detail, but failed to keep his literature audience engaged in that section of the essay. In another paragraph, where he brought up Sea and Spar Between, and the inspiration that Montfort and Strickland had in combining Moby Dick and Dickinson poetry, he was no longer appealing to his computer science audience. He detailed all of the concepts, terms, and works he was discussing but still failed to acknowledge the fact that he was more lettered on both the topics of the literature and coding programs that he was discussing than his