SOURCE: Bloom, Harold. “Blake's Jerusalem: The Bard of Sensibility and the Form of Prophecy.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 4, no. 1 (fall 1970): 6-20.

In the following essay, Bloom discusses the similarities between Jerusalem and the book of Ezekiel and the perspectives of Blake and Ezekiel as writers.

… also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man.

—Ezekiel 1: 5

“The midst thereof” refers to “a fire infolding itself,” in the Hebrew literally “a fire taking hold of itself,” a trope for a series of firebursts, one wave of flame after another. Blake's Jerusalem has the form of such a series, appropriate to a poem whose structure takes Ezekiel's book as its model. The Four Zoas, like Young's Night Thoughts, is in the formal shadow of Paradise Lost, and Milton less darkly in the shadow of Job and Paradise...