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

“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” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “To wrap them about in reflected lights was to do this, and to dwell over-fondly upon any softness of hair or flesh was to dwell upon that which was least permanent and least characteristic, for ‘The great and golden rule of art, as of life, is this: that the more distinct, sharp and wiry the boundary-line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling.'”
  2. “Inspiration was to see the permanent and characteristic in all forms, and if you had it not, you must needs imitate with a languid mind the things you saw or remembered, and so sink into the sleep of nature where all is soft and melting.”
  3. “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.”
  4. “he finally escaped from ‘temptations and perturbations’ which sought to destroy ‘the imaginative power’ at ‘the hands of Venetian and Flemish Demons.'”
  5. “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”