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.