ABSTRACT
This chapter explores William Blake’s first foray in America with the publication of José Joaquín de Mora’s Meditaciones poéticas (London, 1826), a collection of poems about death and the afterlife illuminated and inspired by Blake’s designs for Robert Blair’s The Grave. Published by Rudolph Ackermann, Meditaciones participates in the pan-Atlantic cultural exchanges with the newly established Iberoamerican republics, which Ackermann actively promoted. Mora’s disregard for Blair’s text and his reordering and retitling of the plates to tell his own story suggests a direct engagement with the visual poetics of Blake while his poems refract a variety of Romantic influences that range from Byron and Percy Shelley to the political radicalism of Jeremy Bentham.
