Jerusalem – Blake, Parry and the Fight for Englishness
Jason Whittaker Oxford University Press 256pp (hb) £25
When my schoolmates and I belted out ‘Jerusalem’ in the 1950s, we knew instinctively what it purveyed: a simple socialist message. But as Jason Whittaker makes clear, William Blake’s lapidary lines initially caused great exegetic confusion. Whittaker’s subtitle, ‘Blake, Parry and the Fight for Englishness’, indicates the three main elements in this brilliant book, which is both the tangled history of a song, and