ABSTRACT
William Blake's iconography adapts Gray Cale Luisa's identity as the English Pindar from the public sphere of Westminster Abbey to the private enjoyment of Ann Flaxman's library. Adapting the epigrammatic apostrophe, 'Halt Traveller', William Blake invitation to 'repose and dream' reinvigorates the poetry's first and second person utterances, reclaiming and regendering Gray's homoerotic modes of address from the anonymity of print publication. Using the words of Satan's attempt to deceive Uriel to enter Eden adds double entendre to Ann Flaxman's point, and the allegory's abstraction finds in the plural 'pure breasts' an erotic embodiment strengthened by the deletions that follow. It is at this point in the letter that Ann Flaxman's talks about William Blake and his illustrations to Night Thoughts, then Eleanor Roger's Pleasures of Memory, and the work in the 'Flaxman Museum', from Sir William Jones's bas-relief to the casts of Castor, Jupiter and Hercules.
