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

“he finally escaped from ‘temptations and perturbations’ which sought to destroy ‘the imaginative power’ at ‘the hands of Venetian and Flemish Demons.'” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.”
  2. “There are many mediums in the means–none, oh, not a jot, not a shadow of a jot, in the end of great art. In a picture whose merit is to be excessively brilliant, it can’t be too brilliant, but individual tints may be too brilliant…. We must not begin with medium, but think always on excess and only use medium to make excess more abundantly excessive.”
  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. “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”
  5. “The struggle of the first part of his life had been to distinguish between these two schools, and to cleave always to the Florentine, and so to escape the fascination of those who seemed to him to offer the sleep of nature to a spirit weary with the labours of inspiration”