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

“Passions, because most living, are most holy—and this was a scandalous paradox in his time—and man shall enter eternity borne upon their wings.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “It only becomes a thing of delight when Time is being borne to his tomb in eternity, for then the spirit of the Earth, man’s procreant mind, fills it with his own joyousness.”
  2. “He had learned from Jacob Boehme and from old alchemist writers that imagination was the first emanation of divinity, ‘the body of God,’ ‘the Divine members,’ and he drew the deduction, which they did not draw, that the imaginative arts were therefore the greatest of Divine revelations, and that the sympathy with all living things, sinful and righteous alike, which the imaginative arts awaken, is that forgiveness of sins commanded by Christ.”
  3. “Shelley understood this, as is proved by what he says of the eternity of beautiful things and of the influence of the dead, but whether he understood that the great memory is also a dwelling-house of symbols, of images that are living souls, I cannot tell.”
  4. “He cried again and again that every thing that lives is holy, and that nothing is unholy except things that do not live–lethargies, and cruelties, and timidities, and that denial of imagination which is the root they grew from in old times.”
  5. “In his time educated people believed that they amused themselves with books of imagination but that they ‘made their souls’ by listening to sermons and by doing or by not doing certain things. When they had to explain why serious people like themselves honoured the great poets greatly they were hard put to it for lack of good reasons.”