Who Are Blake’s Eternals?

Abstract

This essay answers the question in its title by analyzing Blake’s differing presentations of Eternal beings from their introduction in The First Book of Urizen (1794) through his culminating long poem Jerusalem (1804–​20). The essay proposes, as well, a meaning for this evolution. It argues that the limitation of Eternal awareness to immortals and the conception of a sharp divide between the eternal and material worlds, in Urizen’s dominant narrative, clashed with earlier Blake presentations of similar issues, but that he turned back to his earlier conceptualizations in late work. In doing so, he came to present mortal humans, not only immortals, as able to inhabit Eternity, a possibility all but excluded in Urizen.