¹ All references to Blake’s work are to David Erdman’s The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Newly Revised Edition, 1982. For poetry, an abbreviated title (where appropriate) and plate and line numbers are given in parenthesis; for letters, annotations and other writings, page numbers are given in parenthesis after the abbreviation "CB" (for Complete Blake), used to distinguish this text from other works by Erdman. close window

² For a useful summary of these positions, see Paley, The Continuing City, pp. 279-294, and Fred Dortort, The Dialectic of Vision, pp. 421-448. Other critics whose approaches deny the poem’s narrative continuity include W. J. T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art, and Stuart Curran, "The Structures of Jerusalem." To a degree, any reading that approaches the poem on a plate-by-plate basis, isolating the individual plates from each other and from the surrounding context, tends toward a synchronic position. close window

³ I made the case for narrative in Jerusalem at length in my unpublished dissertation, Significant Events: Language and Narrative in Blake’s Jerusalem, directed by Robert F. Gleckner, Duke University, 1992. The argument for narrative is implicit in my article "Not from Troy, But Jerusalem: Blake’s Canon Revision" (Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 31:1 [Summer] 1997), based on a 1994 NASSR conference paper, and in two other conference papers: "Gouging Jerusalem: Reading Blake’s Revisions." (NASSR, 1998) and "Epigrams and Epics: Two Models for Reading Blake’s Jerusalem." (NEMLA, 1996). close window

⁴ For a use of this analogy contemporary with Blake, one need look no farther than Percy Shelley’s "Defense of Poetry": "for the savage is to the ages what the child is to years" (481). close window