work boostedwartime morale
Written by Romantic poet William Blake between 1804 and 1810, what we now know as Jerusalem was originally the preface to the epic poem Milton.
It wasn’t until 1916 that Blake’s work was put to music. This came after the then little-known poem Jerusalem was included in a poetry anthology of 1916, which was created to raise morale during the First World War.
Poet Laureate Robert Bridges asked Sir Hubert Parry to put Jerusalem to music, apparently requesting “suitable, simple music that an audience could take up and join in”.