ABSTRACT
The periodic rediscovery of William Blake in the nineteenth century by various individuals--Alexander Gilchrist, A. C. Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William and Butler Yeats--is something very different from Blake's total effect on the twentieth century. While Robert Bly looked forward to more Blakean imagination in contemporary American poetry, Louis Dudek hailed Blake as one of the forerunners of a new Romantic poetry. In the 1960's, Blake found his first popular audience. The "new consciousness," doomed to burn out very shortly, created a receptive environment for Blake's vision, and was in turn molded by that vision. Blake has been referred to in a number of contexts that either directly or indirectly relates to the "new romanticism" of the 1960's. Ronald Shain looks to Blake's work as a model for estrangement. David Ketters and D. Suvin refer to Blake as an influence on science fiction.
