Abstract

Blake’s stanzas from the Preface to Milton a Poem, better known as the hymn “Jerusalem”, are by far the most popular of his poems to have been set to music, with at least 406 audio recordings and scores . These date from 1908 – when Henry Walford Davies published the first setting of Blake’s stanzas to music as part of his set of three-part songs, England’s Pleasant Land – to the reinterpration of Parry’s hymn by Tokio Myers and Jazmin Sawyers for the 2018 Commonwealth Games. This paper includes a selection of fifty of the most original settings.