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

“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.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “He was a man crying out for a mythology, and trying to make one because he could not find one to his hand.”
  2. “They sing unwearied to the notes of my immortal hand. The solemn, silent moon Reverberates the long harmony sounding upon my limbs. The birds and beasts rejoice and play, And every one seeks for his mate to prove his inmost joy.”
  3. “In the illustrations of Purgatory there is a serene beauty, and one finds his Dante and Virgil climbing among the rough rocks under a cloudy sun, and in their sleep upon the smooth steps towards the summit, a placid, marmoreal, tender, starry rapture.”
  4. “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.”
  5. “He announced the religion of art, of which no man dreamed in the world about him; and he understood it more perfectly than the thousands of subtle spirits who have received its baptism in the world about us, because, in the beginning of important things–in the beginning of love, in the beginning of the day, in the beginning of any work, there is a moment when are understand more perfectly than we understand again until all is finished.”