Although America (1793) is usually read as a work of radical history and millennial prophecy, it is framed by plates that collocate hope and despair, peace and violence, morning (paradise) and mourning (disaster). The dilemma this poses is typically managed by troping the second term in each of these pairs as a concomitant rather than contaminant of revolution, that the journey to utopia soon leaves behind. To do otherwise, it is implied, would be to side with the forces of reaction rather than revolution. In contrast, in this paper I argue that by hurrying to resolve the tension between morning and mourning critics eclipse the historical and visual/textual frame for the poem’s exploration of trauma, the fragmentation it causes, the desire for transcendence it provokes, and its consequences for the imagination. Blake critics are still fond of tracing in Blake’s work a shift from politics to art, and from critique of Christianity to more orthodox belief. However, his later works look very different if, building on the account of trauma first developed in America, they are an attempt to describe a radical politics able to negotiate the space between feeling bodies and numbed minds. Read in this light, they may still have much to say about the present in which we are living.

Peter Otto is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne and a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In addition to two monographs on Blake, his publications include Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (OUP, 2011); Innovations in Encompassing Large Scenes (Romantic Circles, 2013); and, as editor, 21st Century Oxford Authors: William Blake (OUP 2018; paperback 2022) and, as co-editor, Varieties of Imagination, Creativity, and Wellbeing in Australia (Unlikely, 2025). He is currently completing a book, funded by the Australian Research Council, on ‘Architectures of Imagination: Bodies, Buildings, Fictions, and Worlds.’