Perception and the Fall of Albion in William Blake's "Jerusalem"
Abstract
This paper is not a scholarly work, but the product of
a more or less personal confrontation with Blake's system as
it appears in Jerusalem. I have been so unscholarly as to
avoid, as far as poss1ble, what others have written about
the poem and Blake's work in general. My major purpose has
been to discover how I should fare in battle with a poetic
vision which I found from the beginning to be quite difficult
and unlike any I had ever encountered before. In the process
of my study, I have learned a great deal about Blake
and perhaps even more about myself--about my critical abilities
and proclivities, as well as about my more basic philosophy.
I have been greatly attracted by Blake's brand of
humanism, his existent1alistic intersubjectivity, which,
though less strictly systematic than, say, that of Martin
Buber or Maurice Marleau-Ponty, is in a way more "down-to-earth" and practical than either.