SOURCE: Rothenberg, Molly Anne. “Blake Reads ‘The Bard’: Contextual Displacement and Conditions of Readability in Jerusalem.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 27, no. 3 (summer 1987): 489-502.

In the following essay, Rothenberg argues that the key to understanding Blake's Jerusalem is to start with the premise that the poem produced itself and is its own context.

The reader who seeks to unlock Jerusalem must devise a reading strategy to handle the poem's apparent incoherencies. At the outset of the poem, the reader's situation is complicated by assurances that the “origin” of the work guarantees its coherence; the much-quoted address to the public provides for two possible, and mutually exclusive, sources of the poem. Blake explains first that the origin is some external power which “dictated” the poem to him, but he immediately contradicts himself by claiming responsibility for the choice of a novel type of verse that encompasses a variety of...