The Everlasting Gospel

Blake's notebooks after his death disclose an unfinished poem titled "The Everlasting Gospel." The message of the poem is enduring, and presents a humanist document with few parallels and perhaps no predecessors. Blake's personality was seen by his contemporaries as part genius, part naïf-just the combination to touch areas of sensibility remote from the rest of us. But in fact good and evil are not at all remote, they are simply removed from our daily considerations. To live with such consciousness, and with such conviction to shout against the platitudes of our lives, may be possible only for such a personality. Blake's ability to step outside the conventional thinking of his day (and of ours) gave him a point of view from which he could critically re-evaluate cherished values and expectations of the Christian tradition, such as good and evil.