William Blake and the Myth of America

Bibliographic Data

ID23991580
AuthorsLinda Freedman
Year2018
Publication date2018-08-23
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueWilliam Blake and the Myth of America (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/oso/9780198813279.001.0001
ISBN9780198813279
LanguageEN
Citations received3

This book tells the story of William Blake’s literary reception in America and suggests that ideas about Blake’s poetry and personality helped shape mythopoeic visions of America from the abolitionists to the counterculture. It links high and low culture and covers poetry, music, theology, and the novel. American writers have turned to Blake in times of cataclysmic change, terror, and hope to rediscover the symbolic meaning of their country. Blake entered American society when slavery was rife and civil war threatened the fragile experiment of democracy. He found his moment in the mid-twentieth-century counterculture as left-wing Americans took refuge in the arts at a time of increasingly reactionary conservatism, vicious racism, pervasive sexism, dangerous nuclear competition, and an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, the fires of Orc raging against the systems of Urizen. Blake’s America, as a symbol of cyclical hope and despair, influenced many Americans who saw themselves as continuing the task of prophecy and vision. Blakean forms of bardic song, aphorism, prophecy, and lament became particularly relevant to a literary tradition which centralized the relationship between aspiration and experience. His interrogations of power and privilege, freedom and form resonated with Americans who repeatedly wrestled with the deep ironies of new world symbolism and sought to renew a Whitmanesque ideal of democracy through affection and openness towards alterity.

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