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

“All in this great series are in some measure powerful and moving, and not, as it is customary to say of the work of Blake, because a flaming imagination pierces through a cloudy and indecisive technique, but because they have the only excellence possible in any art, a mastery over artistic expression.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “The technique of Blake was imperfect, incomplete, as is the technique of well-nigh all artists who have striven to bring fires from remote summits; but where his imagination is perfect and complete, his technique has a like perfection, a like completeness.”
  2. “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.”
  3. “If ‘the world of imagination’ was ‘the world of eternity,’ as this doctrine implied, it was of less importance to know men and nature than to distinguish the beings and substances of imagination from those of a more perishable kind, created by the phantasy, in uninspired moments, out of memory and whim”
  4. “Ideas cannot be given but in their minutely appropriate words, nor can a design be made without its minutely appropriate execution.”
  5. “he finally escaped from ‘temptations and perturbations’ which sought to destroy ‘the imaginative power’ at ‘the hands of Venetian and Flemish Demons.'”