Fred Dortort. The Dialectic of Vision: A Contrary Reading of William Blake's Jerusalem. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Arts (imprint of Barrytown, LTD), 1998. Pp. xxviii+468. $24.95 paper. In The Dialectic of Vision: A Contrary Reading of William Blake's Jerusalem, Fred Dortort offers a close reading of Blake's last major epic. This sort of close reading of Jerusalem is something we have long needed to complement Morton Paley's The Continuing City which provides extensive background and structural analysis of the poem, but which also explicitly discounts the importance of a sequence of events in the poem. Dortort's determination to confront the poem in all its difficulty is also a welcome change from critical work which often avoids such confrontation either by taking refuge in the history of the poem's composition or by invoking, for example, a principle of sublime impenetrability. Dortort engages the often confusing syntax of the poem, as well as the poem's other well known problems, and he arrives at a reading of Jerusalem that turns the moral valences of the poem inside out. His thesis is clearly controversial, though somewhat less than convincing.
