". . . in Blake’s work of course the pictures and words are fundamentally intertwined." This, of course, is the premise behind sites like the WBA and others, not to mention much recent Blake scholarship. Nonetheless, there is the pragmatic dimension to the arguemnt: Blake was posthumously canonized as a poet in no small part due to the technologies of print publishing, which made it easy to reproduce the words but much harder to reproduce the pictures. Thus "The Tyger" becomes the most anthologized poem in the language, yet relatively few of its readers have also seen the plate. Nonetheless, the shelves groan with reams of Blake interpretation of the work as poetry, text--in what sense, then can we argue that the words and images are truly "inextricabke"?

Just playing a little devil's advocate . . .

William J. Mitchell, in an influential book entitled _Blake's Composite Art_--one of the very first to devote significant attention to the images--advances the argument that Blake's art is "composed" jointly of words and images, but the mutual interdependence of the two is overplayed.