I wish to speak of Blake’s disavowal of deconstruction or atomisation as an appropriate route to understanding. This is consistent with his method of production, and can be used to show just how symbolically important his method is. For his prophetic books he eschewed the normal, well-developed techniques of movable type, or letterpress; the standard technology for printing text at this time, and used for producing anything from high-finish books to newspapers. Instead he chose to engrave and etch onto metal plates. In movable type the typesetter selects individual glyphs (letters, punctuation, spaces) from a standardized type case in which each glyph would have its own compartment. By the end of the 18th Century the form of glyph-shapes had largely settled upon those with which we are familiar with today. Type cases varied very little between print shops, and the industry was rapidly expanding. The printing of a page would have distinct routine (in the computational sense):

1. Each line of text would be assembled from the “fount” of lead pieces in the type case,
2. Each line would be assembled into a page and locked into a chase,
3. The page impressions would be made on paper,
4. The page and lines would be disassembled and the letters returned to the type case.

Blake illustrated many letterpress books, and many of his works were printed in this manner, but for his prophetic books  he developed a technique by which the conception and execution are one. A typesetter may easily correct and edit; but an engraved mark, once laid down, is incredibly difficult to remove or replace – it will appear in the final impression. More so than with most poets we can consider the definition of large sections of the Blake canon as total (whether this is an accident of method or intention will be argued), once engraved the poems are practically final, he rarely physically re-engraved a work, or altered one in any aspect other than colour-scheme. This immediacy of production, the Mosaic quality of the copper tablets in which he inscribes his images, only further highlights the tone of the work and the matrix of its mythologies.  Blake’s philosophical conception of the individual singularity of man which underlies Jerusalem extends to his dogmatic stance on the Design and Execution of his works:

I have heard many People say Give me the Ideas. It is no matter what Words you put them into & others say Give me the Design it is no matter for the Execution. These People know Enough of Artifice but Nothing of Art. Ideas cannot be Given but in their minutely Appropriate Words nor Can a Design be made without its minutely Appropriate Execution.

However this is not it is not merely a philosophical or aesthetic stance, it is also, for Blake, a question of morality and liberty:

"I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables… all are necessary to each other. Poetry Fetter’d, Fetters the Human Race!"
(‘To The Public’, Plate 3, Jerusalem, p. 146)

Blake was intimately concerned about the problems of law and punishment, and he saw the regimentation of poetry as analogous to the regimentation of society. We shall see how tyranny and absolutism were linked for Blake in his own life with utterance and expression, and how he viewed interpretation of the structure of society is that it, purposefully or otherwise, ground up “The living & the dead… in our rumbling Mills”. The desperate terror for Blake is of the atomization of every segment of human life into an indistinguishable, un-delineated meal of components.

Singularity on an individual level and a pan-humanity level is Blake’s greatest desire (if this is illogical, then it is a particularly Blakean sort of illogic), it occurs in the composition of his text, the conception of his designs, and in the individual instance-copies of the work. Each copy of these ‘Illuminated Print’ works are printed and coloured by hand by Blake himself, they are bespoke. If “each volume is… a performance of the fundamental text-design drama on the copper plates" (p.833, ‘William Blake, William Hamilton, and the Materials of Graphic Meaning’,  Robert N. Essick) on which not separate ‘words’ and ‘illustration’, but rather the “single visualizable picture” is engraved then “…the units of poetry are images rather than ideas, and a poems total meaning is therefore a total image.” (p. 41, ‘Poetry and Design in William Blake’, Northrop Frye) The importance of performance, this is the key term of which to take note. The prophetic voice of Blake in Jerusalem cannot be taken seriously unless it is performance. The individual creation of each copy of his volumes is inefficient, expensive and wasteful of time unless we consider that it replaces the intermediaries of writer, editor, publisher, typesetter and printer with a single actor in a single performance of ‘Emanation’, engraving, impression of inked copper onto paper, colouring, binding as a single cohesive act of expression. Blake highlights the bane and boon of critics everywhere, that:

“Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works,” (‘To the Public’, p. 692, Blake)

and therefore for Blake his technique is nothing sort of a revolution; giving him the ability to complete his total work, from conception to execution, single-handedly.