The artist qua artist neither doubts nor believes his religion: he sees what it means, and he knows how to illustrate it. His religion performs two great services for him. It provides him with a generally understood body of symbols, and it puts into his hands the visionary masterpieces on which it is founded: the Bible particularly, in the case of Christian poets. Many of these latter have petrified into sacred Scriptures supposed now to impart exclusive formulas of salvation rather than vision. It is the business of a poet, however, to see them as poems, and base his own poetry on them as such.
To do this he must bring out more sharply and accurately what the human mind was trying to do when it first created the beings we now call gods. Jupiter is a sky-god: he is a product of the imaginative tendency to see the sky as an old man, as Blake sees the thistle, and not as an abstraction called Heaven. Originally he was conceived as a tyrannical old bully because he represented the imaginative feeling of a hostile mystery in the sky-world. Venus became a beautiful harlot because the imagination sees “nature” as a woman and finds her lovely but treacherous. As the original “organized men,” or “Giant forms,” dwindle into gods, the clarity of their relationship to the archetypal myth becomes blurred, and irrelevant stories and attributes cluster around them. They become increasingly vague and general until, in their final stages, they are mere personifications; and by the time that Phoebus and Philomela have become highbrow synonyms for the sun and the nightingale, they have disappeared.
It is only in works of art that these hazy divinities can be provided with a distinctive context and given a particular meaning. “Venus” means nothing: an Aphrodite by Phidias, the Venus of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, the Venus of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, do mean something, though very different things. Once again we come back to the point that religion is raw imaginative material clarified by art.
This is why we meet so many new names in Blake and find ourselves reading about Vala and Urizen instead of Venus and Zeus. It may be thought that the more familiar names would make the Prophecies easier, but actually it would make them more difficult. To Venus and Zeus we bring memories and associations rather than a concentrated response, and are thus continually impelled to search outside the poem being read for its meaning. And as no two poets can possibly mean the same thing by “Venus,” we should have to go through a long process of discarding misleading associations which the use of a new name prevents at once.