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

“He was a man crying out for a mythology, and trying to make one because he could not find one to his hand.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “In our time we are agreed that we ‘make our souls’ out of some one of the great poets of ancient times, or out of Shelley or Wordsworth, or Goethe or Balzac, or Flaubert, or Count Tolstoy, in the books he wrote before he became a prophet and fell into a lesser order, or out of Mr. Whistler’s pictures, while we amuse ourselves, or, at best, make a poorer sort of soul, by listening to sermons or by doing or by not doing certain things.”
  2. “This philosophy kept him more simply a poet than any poet of his time, for it made him content to express every beautiful feeling that came into his head without troubling about its utility or chaining it to any utility.”
  3. “The joy of woman is the death of her beloved, Who dies for love of her, In torments of fierce jealousy and pangs of adoration. The lover’s night bears on my song, And the nine spheres rejoice beneath my powerful control.”
  4. “now he wrote, ‘O glory, and O delight! I have entirely reduced that spectrous fiend to his station’–he had overcome the merely reasoning and sensual portion of the mind–‘whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last twenty years of my life….”
  5. “The reason, and by the reason he meant deductions from the observations of the senses, binds us to mortality because it binds us to the senses, and divides us from each other by showing us our clashing interests; but imagination divides us from mortality by the immortality of beauty, and binds us to each other by opening the secret doors of all hearts.”