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

“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.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “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.”
  2. “The poet of essences and pure ideas must seek in the half-lights that glimmer from symbol to symbol as if to the ends of the earth, all that the epic and dramatic poet finds of mystery and shadow in the accidental circumstance of life.”
  3. “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.”
  4. “When he describes the Moon as part of some beautiful scene he can call her beautiful, but when he personifies, when his words come under the influence of that great memory or of some mysterious tide in the depth of our being, he grows unfriendly or not truly friendly or at the most pitiful.”
  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.”