SOURCE: Mellor, Anne K. “The Human Form Divine and the Structure of Blake's Jerusalem.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 11, no. 3 (summer 1971): 595-620.

In the following essay, Mellor analyzes how Blake's struggle with the concept of the potentially divine living within the finite is expressed in Jerusalem.

Blake always believed that man is, at least potentially, infinite and divine; in 1788, he concluded There is No Natural Religion with a statement he never retracted: “Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is” (E-B.2).¹ But Blake also recognized that man has fallen or can fall into finite forms; man can fall into both the physical confinement of the human body and into the mental manacles of rational categories. Yet Blake, as an artist and poet, also knew that finite form is essential to all artistic creation. In his late poetry and art (after 1795), Blake wrestled...