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

“As poetry admits not a letter that is insignificant, so painting admits not a grain of sand or a blade of grass insignificant, much less an insignificant blot or blur.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “the merely mortal part of the mind, ‘the spectre,’ creates ‘pyramids of pride,’ and ‘pillars in the deepest hell to reach the heavenly arches,’ and seeks to discover wisdom in ‘the spaces between the stars,’ not ‘in the stars,’ where it is”
  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. T Polyphilus posts a banishing for the young
  4. “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.”
  5. “‘I know that the majority of Englishmen are bound by the indefinite … a line is a line in its minutest particulars, straight or crooked. It is itself not intermeasurable by anything else … but since the French Revolution’–since the reign of reason began, that is–‘Englishmen are all intermeasurable with one another, certainly a happy state of agreement in which I do not agree.'”