"Blake might indeed have been starved, but for the good fortune in meeting in 1818 the young artist John Linell, through whose help he was able to live while drawing and engraving his great series of illustrations to the Book of Job and to Dante. It was about this time that he wrote his last important poem The Everlasting Gospel. It is, for him, a new kind of poetry, in which his elaborate symbolism is abandoned for the barest and most direct statement with complete success. In it Jesus appears as the last of his series of Promethean heroes at war with the Satanic forces of repression. The date of this poem is noteworthy. It is often suggested that Blake in his later life modified his ideas, coming closer to those of orthodox Christianity, yet the fact is that in this work of his old age they are expressed with the greatest clarity and sharpness. It is clear also, from the condition in which the text has reached us, that the ideas in The Everlasting Gospel were a constant pre-occupation, something to which he constantly returned and never ceased to reshape." (Morton 20)

A. L. Morton sees this work by William Blake as the clearest of the windows the poet and artist opens for us into his soul, and indeed it may be. However, what you will most likely find through the use of this resource is that even a "direct statement" from Blake is not a direct statement. The importance of the ideas expressed in The Everlasting Gospel and their continual presence in Blake's mind may be clear enough, but what these ideas actually are is anything but clear. To Morton, Blake's statements in this work may be full of "clarity and sharpness," and you may also weave your way through this site and arrive at some understanding of Blake's message, if indeed you discover that he has one. But understand this: the two of you may not have read the same "poem." And if you read it again, you may find that it has changed. Blake once said, "that which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care" (letter to Trusler, 1799), and he apparently meant it.

In the one hundred twenty-five years since Michael Rossetti first published the lines found in Blake's notebook as The Everlasting Gospel, countless orderings of the "poem's" many sections have been produced as the proper way of reading through the maze of various pages, tie-ins, notes, and marginal corrections and/or comments the poet left behind. D. G. Rossetti, Algernon C. Swinburne, W. M. Rossetti, W. B. Yeats, John Sampson, Geoffrey Keynes, and David V. Erdman are notables on the list of scholars who have edited this work, each believing their own interpretation to be Blake's intended one.

I, however, have refused to produce yet another order for this work. Randel Helms said of this work: "For all its power, The Everlasting Gospel stands as a ruin of fragments and false starts. Blake tried again and again to say what he wanted, and never quite found the right way" (122), and he is exactly right, at least as far as we know. Blake never finished, much less published, this work himself, and it is pointless and unfair of us to criticize a poem that was never a poem. In this site, you have a chance to make up your own mind about these ideas from the Rossetti Manuscript of Blake's work, just as the renowned critics and thinkers listed above did before; every section is connected to every other section, with notes provided (if you need them) for help, entertainment, or merely for interest's sake. After all, when it comes to The Everlasting Gospel, the only opinion that matters is your own.

Notes on the site:

**First and foremost, I advise you to use Internet Explorer when viewing this site, since many of the design and formatting elements will not be seen properly through other browsers (Netscape in particular).

Each letter in the list to the right side of your screen (and at the top in subsequent frame templates) refers to a different section of The Everlasting Gospel and serves as an active link to that section. In the frame templates that present each section, the center frame contains the text as it appears in Blake's notebook (or attached pages), here called the Rossetti Manuscript. The notebook pages which correspond to each section can be viewed as Blake wrote them by clicking on the Rossetti Manuscript link in the frame to the left of the text. This frame also contains annotations to significant characters, words, or phrases in the text as well as a link to a complete index of annotations. When the link for each annotation is activated, the notes will appear in the frame directly below the text. Other relevant images to each section of the work appear as thumbnails in the frame to the right of the text. If you click on these thumbnails, a larger version of the image will appear in a new window that you can just close to return to the site. These images may take a while to load, but they're worth it (I promise). Finally, the frame at the top of the screen serves as your site navigator, providing links to all other sections of The Everlasting Gospel, other Blake sites on the web, the bibliography to this site, the site introduction page, and an e-mail program for your questions and comments.

*All of the frames in this site are adjustable (click and drag them with your mouse), so if you don't like the way your screen looks, change it.

*The list I have provided is the one found in The Complete Prose & Poetry of William Blake, edited by David V. Erdman. This was done not to influence you, but because a list must have have some order for it to be easily used. The line break separates the works Erdman included from those he did not.

*Some other orders to try:

• W. B. Yeats--e k i f l
• John Sampson--e i j k h d f g l