This is a lecture by Professor Edwin G Wilson to students at Wake Forest University:
You can follow pictures from Blake's America and Europe thru looking at the books at the Internet Archive as you listen to the lecture.
America - Internet Archive
Europe - Internet Archive
In 2015 Yale Center for British Art presented an Exihibition titled Critique of Reason: Romantic Art,1760-1860. Included in the Exihibition were several of Blake's works.
The following quote is from the Yale Center for British Art, Gallery label for the Critique of Reason: Romantic Art,1760 -1860.
"At the height of the political and social upheaval of the French Revolution, William Blake printed his first full-scale prophetic book, America. A Prophecy. Rather than recounting the horrors that reverberated from France throughout Europe, his illustrated poem reflects on the revolutionary spirit in the American colonies, which had ended in American independence a decade earlier. Blake and many other radicals in the 1790s viewed the American Revolution as the beginning of a global process of liberating nations from superstition and despotism. Although America. A Prophecy is rooted in recent events, the text and accompanying plates do not offer a historical chronology but rather transform history into a mythical narrative of universal relevance."
I think I was most impressed by Professor Wilson's description of Orc since my association of Orc has been as Los and Enithirmon's jealous son as shown in this picture.
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National Gallery Victoria Book of Urizen Plate 21 |
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Yale Center for British Art America Plate 10 |
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