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

“Against another desire of his time, derivative also from what he has called ‘corporeal reason,’ the desire for a ‘tepid moderation,’ for a lifeless ‘sanity in both art and life,’ he had protested years before with a paradoxical violence.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “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.”
  2. “To cover the imperishable lineaments of beauty with shadows and reflected lights was to fall into the power of his ‘Vala,’ the indolent fascination of nature, the woman divinity who is so often described in ‘the prophetic books’ as ‘sweet pestilence,’ and whose children weave webs to take the souls of men”
  3. “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”
  4. “but the immortal part makes all his labours vain, and turns his pyramids to ‘grains of sand,’ his ‘pillars’ to ‘dust on the fly’s wing,’ and makes of ‘his starry heavens a moth of gold and silver mocking his anxious grasp.'”
  5. “now he wrote, ‘O glory, and O delight! I have entirely reduced that spectrous fiend to his station’–he had overcome the merely reasoning and sensual portion of the mind–‘whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last twenty years of my life….”