William Blake and his Illustrations to The Divine Comedy in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.

“Blake’s imagination ‘weakened’ and ‘darkened’ until a ‘memory of nature and of the pictures of various schools possessed his mind, instead of appropriate execution’ flowing from the vision itself” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “Blake represented the shapes of beauty haunting our moments of inspiration: shapes held by most for the frailest of ephemera, but by him for a people older than the world, citizens of eternity, appearing and reappearing in the minds of artists and of poets, creating all we touch and see by casting distorted images of themselves upon ‘the vegetable glass of nature’; and because beings, none the less symbols, blossoms, as it were, growing from invisible immortal roots, hands, as it were, pointing the way into some divine labyrinth.”
  2. “This letter may have been the expression of a moment’s enthusiasm, but was more probably rooted in one of those intuitions of coming technical power which every creator feels, and learns to rely upon; for all his greatest work was done, and the principles of his art were formulated, after this date. Except a word here and there, his writings hitherto had not dealt with the principles of art except remotely and by implication; but now he wrote much upon them, and not in obscure symbolic verse, but in emphatic prose, and explicit if not very poetical rhyme.”
  3. “when man’s desire to rest from spiritual labour, and his thirst to fill his art with mere sensation and memory, seem upon the point of triumph, some miracle transforms them to a new inspiration”
  4. “I would teach you the new ritual of ‘Arrivism’: If you would realize God you must first re-create your God within. You can become God by expurgating—for what is without is an exhausting-transudating past.”
  5. “William Blake was the first writer of modern times to preach the indissoluble marriage of all great art with symbol.”