‘Continually Building, Continually Destroying’: Language in Jerusalem

Abstract

In his 1830 Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Allan Cunningham writes of his anxiety on reading Jerusalem. For Cunningham, the poem does not ‘display’ its giant forms as the preface promises, but obscures them, hopelessly befogging its meaning:

A production so exclusively wild was not allowed to make its appearance in an ordinary way: [Blake] thus announced it. ‘After my three years’ slumber on the banks of the ocean, I again display my giant forms to the public’. Of these designs there are no less than an hundred; what their meaning is the artist has left unexplained. It seems of a religious, political, and spiritual kind; now glancing at the distractions of our own days, and then making a transition to the antediluvians. The crowning defect is obscurity; meaning seems now and then about to dawn; you turn plate after plate, and read motto after motto, in the hope of escaping from darkness into light. But the first might as well be looked at as the last … men, spirits, gods, and angels, move with an ease which makes one lament that we know not wherefore they are put in motion … He considered the Jerusalem to be his greatest work … Few joined the artist in his admiration. The Jerusalem, with all its giant forms, failed to force its way into circulation.¹

Los built the stubborn structure of the Language, acting against Albions melancholy, who must else have been a Dumb despair.

(Blake, Jerusalem)

Do what you will this Lifes a Fiction

And is made up of Contradiction

(Blake, The Everlasting Gospel)