William Blake and the Myth of America

From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture

Linda Freedman

A fascinating account of William Blake's literary reception in America
Covers a wide range of forms including prose, newspaper and periodical publication, the novel, music, theology, film, visual art, and poetry
Organised by period and author and artist and examines the reactions of key American Modernists such as Marianne Moore, Theodore Roethke, and Stanley Kunitz
Discusses Blake and the counterculture in relation to Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, The Doors, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, and others
Will appeal to readers of both nineteenth-century and twentieth-century American literature and culture as well as readers of Blake
Includes illustrations that showcase countercultural images alongside those of Blake

William Blake and the Myth of America

From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture

Linda Freedman

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.

William Blake and the Myth of America

From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture

Linda Freedman

1:Spirit and Society: Blake's Early American Appeal
2:Blake and Whitman: Prophets of Democracy
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

William Blake and the Myth of America

From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture

Linda Freedman

Author Information

Linda Freedman, Lecturer in English and American Literature, University College London

Linda Freedman is a Lecturer in English and American literature at University College London. She is the author of Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and has published widely on nineteenth and twentieth century literature. Her work explores the relationship between literature, theology, and the visual arts; transatlantic connections; and the afterlife of Romanticism.

William Blake and the Myth of America

From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture

Linda Freedman

Reviews and Awards

"wonderful ... a wide range of reference skillfully presented, and beautifully illustrated ... remind[s] us just how central the US discussion of slavery was to UK conversations throughout both periods." - Pamela K. Gilbert, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

"In this generously illustrated book (16 plates, most colored), Freedman herself has managed to map out succinctly a wide range of American cultural activities, offering clear explanations and sharp critical insights. Blake emerges from it as a figure who quickly came to inspire a young nation haunted by its own sense of exceptional possibilities. An important part of Freedman's achievement lies in her incisive account of how Blake has remained relevant to the struggles, difficulties, and disappointments entailed in the attempt to realize an imagined America." - Andrew Lincoln, University of London, Review 19

"Linda Freedman's comprehensive history of Blake's reception in America, William Blake and the Myth of America: From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture (Oxford, 2018), was the most substantial, and her introduction is an accessible overview of his American reception that would work well in the classroom." - Wayne C. Ripley, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly