Is Jerusalem unreadable? Several of its ringing declarations - “I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create” (pl. 10:20, E 153) - have become cultural mottoes in our time. But is Jerusalem more than a curiosity shop with some treasures amidst the clutter? Viewing the work from afar permits orderly schemes of supposed comprehension; but the closer we come to the poem's walls of words, the less clear our vision, the less certain our resolve to persevere through all 100 plates. To plunge into Jerusalem is to confront a profoundly unsettling experience.

The text of Jerusalem appears to be a narrative, replete with reasonably standard English syntax, a third-person narrative voice, named characters, and events. Yet these ingredients resist linkage into a chronology of represented actions constituting a story, much less a sequence of causes and consequences forming a plot. The characters seem like human personalities for brief passages, but they expand or contract into polymorphous personifications of psychic or cosmic categories resisting both stability and definition. These entities give speeches, but they constitute a series of monologues rather than conversations. Space is granted more than three dimensions, with Britain, Palestine, and fictive places mixed and matched like skewed map overlays. Time is also multiple, with moments and eternities each containing the other. The poem immediately assumes a command of Blake’s private mythology, as though he had carried the epic tradition of beginning in medias res to a bizarre conclusion: not the middle of a famous action, but the middle (muddle?) of Blake’s mind. Yet, for all its freedom from the consensus realities that make texts readable, Jerusalem is highly repetitious in its imagery and actions.