SOURCE: Smith, Mark Trevor. “Striving with Blake's Systems.” In Blake and His Bibles, edited by David V. Erdman, pp. 157-78. West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Smith, in attempting to understand Blake as a writer, analyzes the concept of the system that Blake claimed he must create in Jerusalem and other works.

“It's equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two.”¹

Foster Damon with his dictionary definitions² and Northrop Frye with his summarizing symmetries³ reveal tantalizing glimpses of Blake's promised land. These guides, and others, insist, implicitly if not explicitly, that they will lead us into Blake's “system.” However, most readers do not feel so sanguine about crossing over into that world. Denied entrance, they see at most the view from Pisgah. This border restriction does not fall only on...