William Blake and His Illustrations to the Divine Comedy by W.B. Yeats

I. HIS OPINIONS UPON ART

William Blake was the first writer of modern times to preach the / indissoluble marriage of all great art with symbol. There had been / allegorists and teachers of allegory in plenty, but the symbolic / imagination, or, as Blake preferred to call it, 'vision,' is not allegory, / being 'a representation of what actually exists really and unchangeably. ' / 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. It is happily no part of my purpose to expound in / detail the relations he believed to exist between symbol and mind, for in / doing so I should come upon not a few doctrines which, though they have / not been difficult to many simple persons, ascetics wrapped in skins, / women who had cast away all common knowledge, peasants dreaming by their / sheepfolds upon the hills, are full of obscurity to the man of modern / culture; but it is necessary to just touch upon these relations, because / in them was the fountain of much of the practice and of all the precept of / his artistic life.