From America to The Four Zoas

Abstract

Like some other radicals in the 1790s, Blake saw the American revolution as igniting a process of liberation that would sweep around the globe, exploding repressive superstitions and causing despotic governments to crumble. Some envisaged this process as a fulfillment of the enlightenment that would establish universally acceptable principles of justice based on reason rather than on corrupt tradition. But Blake's antinomianism led him to see the enlightenment as an extension of the errors it aimed to dispel. He imagined global revolution not as universalizing the rule of reason, but as liberating desire and spreading “thought-creating fires” ( SL 6:6, E 68). The vision was certainly rebellious, but Blake himself cut an odd figure as a revolutionary. The links between his prophetic art and contemporary radicalism have been widely explored, but identifying a contemporary fit audience has proved difficult. When he composed America (1793), the first of his “continental prophecies,” he may have thought of it as an intervention in the political debate stimulated by the French revolution. But the advertised price of 10s. 6d. (E 693) put it well out of reach of a popular audience. It was his most ambitious illuminated book to date, with plates more than four times bigger than the Innocence plates.