Robert N. Essick

The William Blake Archive: The Medium When the Millennium Is the Message

It is easier than most people probably suppose to be millennial about editing. The closest thing to religious hope left to most of us may be found in the dreams of editors as they come to think of themselves as, modesdy, the temporary guardians of important messages hurling down perilous lines of transmission from origin to unknown ultimate destination or, less modestly, as the foundation builders of a new age of enlightenment and understanding built on a cornerstone of perfect communication.

Erin, Ireland, and the Emanation in Blake’s Jerusalem

So Paddy says to Fergus, ‘What do the Anglo-Irish and the Irish-Catholics have in common?’ And Fergus says ‘- a hyphen!’ This rather limp joke circulated through the faux-Irish pubs of Santa Monica, California, in the 1970s. But even worse than a bad joke is an attempt to explain it, as I will now demonstrate. By finding an orthographic feature common to the signifiers, Fergus implies that the signifieds have nothing in common; he might just as well have said that the two parties have an ‘a’, an ‘o’, and an T in common. Or might he? Does that hyphen indeed signify something about the Anglo- Irish and the Irish-Catholics — indeed, about Ireland and its historical links o Britain — that the ‘a’, ‘o’, and T do not? And what could that possibly have to do with William Blake’s illuminated epic, Jerusalem? I will attempt to answer these questions, but the route will be a little circuitous and will begin with some musings on how we orchestrate relationships between poems and political history.