William Blake and the Myth of America: From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture

Description

This volume 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 to rediscover the symbolic meaning of their country in times of cataclysmic change, terror, and hope. 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 centralised 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. Cover William Blake and the Myth of America: From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture Copyright Dedication Acknowledgements Contents List of Figures A Note on Texts Introduction 1: Spirit and Society: Blake’s Early American Appeal 2: Prophets of Democracy: Blake and Whitman 3: Early Twentieth-Century America: New Versions of the Prophet 4: Ginsberg’s Prophetic Guru 5: Blake, Duncan, and the Politics of Writing from Myth 6: ‘Energy is Eternal Delight’: Blake and Ecopoetic Action 7: ‘Break on Through’: Musical Openings of the Doors of Perception 8: The Poetics of Belief: Blake and Countercultural Theology 9: Romanticism after Auschwitz: Blake and Bellow 10: Continuing Visions America: A Prophecy Bibliography EDITIONS, BOOKS, AND ARTICLES WEBSITES Index