SOURCE: Helms, Randel. “Ezekiel and Blake's Jerusalem.” Studies in Romanticism 13, no. 2 (spring 1974): 127-40.

In the following essay, Helms considers Blake's use of the book of Ezekiel as a source for the narrative and themes in Jerusalem.

The best way to begin a study of the relationship between Ezekiel and Jerusalem is with Harold Bloom's perception that the “continuity” of Blake's poem is “strikingly like the organization of the book of Ezekiel.”¹ I take up Professor Bloom's suggestion gratefully, but with a sense that there is more to that relationship than even he realizes.² Truculent visionary that he was, Blake most often used Ezekiel less as source than as sounding board. On the simplest level, Jerusalem depends for many of its poetic effects on the force of strikingly recast allusions to Ezekiel, while in a more complex way, it exercises the reader's memory of the overall form of Ezekiel...