ABSTRACT
This chapter considers William Blake's American afterlives as a way of examining how his poetry was remediated in the US in the 1840s and after. To appreciate how significant it was for there to be a readership of Blake's poetry in the US in the 1840s, it is necessary to recall just how much of a literary outcast Blake had been in Britain when living in London and writing and engraving prolifically. Blake's poetics transform into something we recognise as authentically American once his work has crossed the Atlantic and becomes absorbed into Ralph Waldo Emerson's quasi-philosophical prose. Blake's poetry was incorporated into distinctly American prose in an important – if not foundational – instance of transatlantic textual transformation. Despite there being no evidence that Walt Whitman read any of Blake's poems, critics have often spotted similarities in their poetic styles.
