William Blake. Osbert Burdett

      It is with the “Everlasting Gospel,” written much later, probably about 1810, that Blake’s mystical philosophy is most nearly married to his verse, and in taking it after the early poems, we must guard ourselves against overlooking the influences to which he had committed himself completely in the interval. There seems to be an increasing tendency to consider his writings separately from his life, as if he had devoted himself to mystical philosophy – without a doubt, a few extremists will be found to assert that he did. The golden rule of criticism, that a man’s life must be remembered when we would interpret his work, that his work will illumine the obscure corners of his character, is essential to the understanding of Blake. Criticism devoted exclusively to his books, or even to his designs, is barren, for his complex gifts were further complicated by his peculiar circumstances, his strange upbringing, his natural recoil from his age, and the limited influences, which were all that his active imagination had to feed on. No one seems more original. No original mind was, in fact, so much at the mercy of its fate. To allow, even for a moment, his mental background and personal circumstances to slip out of our consciousness is to sacrifice the very foundation on which his peculiarities were nursed. The “Everlasting Gospel,” then, is the poem of a peculiar mind which had experienced nothing to check and everything to encourage its singularity. Blake’s only religious teachers were heresiarchs, and it became natural to him to identify good sense with idiosyncrasy, and to value his interpretation of familiar truths and figures in proportion as it was peculiar to himself. The life which Blake lived and recommended to men is that cultivation of personality that is instinctive in most artists, even in the articulate souls of poets. No one had thought before of incorporating this into a pseudo-theological system or of identifying it with the teaching of Christ. We must look in the “Everlasting Gospel” for what Blake found, not for the gospel which everyone but he had overlooked. This poem’s true subject is the mind of the author, and in it we can learn of his interpretation of the Bible. Like all Blake’s challenging utterances, the couplets that compose the “Everlasting Gospel” contain a series of epigrams which defy systematic analysis, since their object is to excite the reader by creating lively images in his mind. Their virtue is to imbue their subject with life and to recreate Christ in Blake’s own image. The emotion invoked by the verse, which is always vivid and often beautiful, wears an intellectual guise, but intellect was Blake’s word for the imagination, and he awakens emotions rather than satisfies understanding. His purpose was to define Christianity as he had come to understand it after his study of Swedenborg and Milton.