Review: Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion by William Blake
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Okay, I am not about to “review” William Blake. Reading his work is an experience, and you’re in the mood to “get it” or not. You don’t, in the 21st century, evaluate it.

Still it is fair, I think, to try to evaluate this edition of his work.

When I was reading Alan Moore’s remarkable novel Jerusalem a few weeks ago, I wanted to get a sense of Blake’s Jerusalem. I pulled my trusty Penguin Collected Blake off the shelf and started reading, but then I realized I was missing a big part of the experience. Moore may have written a novel entirely in text, but it’s one that turns on the visual fine art he describes. And, of course, Moore has spent most of his career in graphic novels. So, I wanted to see the illustrations Blake prepared for his own work.

That turned out to be tougher than I expected. I assumed there’d be an easily accessible on-line edition, but I couldn’t find one – nor could the college reference librarian I consulted. (There are some great digitized editions on-line at the New York Public Library, but not for Jerusalem.)

Instead, we found this edition from Princeton University Press and, expensive as it is, we ordered it for the library.

It’s a beautiful book, and it’s possible to see all 100 plates of the poem back-to-back. Still…

I believe the originals are a good bit larger than the reproduction. And, at least in my imagination, they’re brighter than the pastels of this. Plus, as a result of the sizing, it’s hard to read the words of the text. Sure they’re typed out at the end of this, but I had that in my Penguin.

So, while this may be the best edition available, it still leaves a lot to be desired. Somehow, it seems, this masterwork of English literature remains inaccessible.

All that said, there are better places to start reading Blake. This one is late-stage stuff. It’s hard to make sense of it since its mythology is already developed. I mean who exactly are Los and Albion, and what do they have to with the dismemberment of Jerusalem – who is himself simultaneously a character, a symbol, and a city as well as a representation of 18th Century London?

And the language and tone is right out of the Book of Revelations with bizarre pronouncements and everything functioning at a mythological, symbolic level more than a literal one.

There are some great lines, of course. This is Blake after all. A couple I love are, “[The sons of Albion are] by Abstraction opposed to the Visions of Imagination,” and “As God is love: every kindness to another is a little Death.”

I don’t pretend to understand it, and I missed being able to see the large and bright illustrations I imagine Blake must have wanted to accompany them, but there is nevertheless occasional magic in the glimpse we get.


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