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. “The sensations of this ‘foolish body,’ this ‘phantom of the earth and water,’ were in themselves but half-living things, ‘vegetative’ things, but passion that ‘eternal glory’ made them a part of the body of God.”
  2. “It is only by ancient symbols, by symbols that have numberless meanings beside the one or two the writer lays an emphasis upon, or the half-score he knows of, that any highly subjective art can escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious arrangement, into the abundance and depth of nature.”
  3. “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.”
  4. “She may give God a body and have Gabriel to bear her messages, or she may come to men in their happy moments as she came to Endymion, or she may deny life and shoot her arrows; but because she only becomes beautiful in giving herself, and is no flying ideal, she is not loved by the children of desire.”
  5. “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.”