William Blake and the Imagination in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.

“William Blake was one of these men, and if he spoke confusedly and obscurely it was because he spoke things for whose speaking he could find no models in the world about him.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “Sometimes one feels, even when one is reading poets of a better time–Tennyson or Wordsworth, let us say–that they have troubled the energy and simplicity of their imaginative passions by asking whether they were for the helping or for the hindrance of the world, instead of believing that all beautiful things have ‘lain burningly on the Divine hand.'”
  2. “We write of great writers, even of writers whose beauty would once have seemed an unholy beauty, with rapt sentences like those our fathers kept for the beatitudes and mysteries of the Church; and no matter what we believe with our lips, we believe with our hearts that beautiful things, as Browning said in his one prose essay that was not in verse, have ‘lain burningly on the Divine hand,’ and that when time has begun to wither, the Divine hand will fall heavily on bad taste and vulgarity.”
  3. “Furious and terrible they rend the nether deep, The deep lifts up his rugged head, And lost in infinite hovering wings vanishes with a cry. The fading cry is ever dying, The living voice is ever living in its inmost joy.”
  4. “There have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the future mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about them, and hid them from the understanding of their times.”
  5. “Blake represented the shapes of beauty haunting our moments of inspiration: shapes held by most for the frailest of ephemera, but by him for a people older than the world, citizens of eternity, appearing and reappearing in the minds of artists and of poets, creating all we touch and see by casting distorted images of themselves upon ‘the vegetable glass of nature’; and because beings, none the less symbols, blossoms, as it were, growing from invisible immortal roots, hands, as it were, pointing the way into some divine labyrinth.”