William Butler Yeats’s ‘The Symbolic System’ of William Blake

Abstract

The theosophical systems formulated by great poets, such as William Blake and William Butler Yeats, represent a personal idiosyncratic actualization of an ancient repertoire of magical symbols and occult visions. This study wants to focus the attention on the philosophical, mythical, and esoteric syncretism that W. B. Yeats drew from William Blake's symbolical system. A fundamental step of Yeats's deep investigation into the Blakean 'vision' was given by his monumental work, written together with Edwin John Ellis, on Blake's poetic and pictorial production, completed in 1893 with a three-volume edition entitled The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical. This work, published in London by Bernard Quaritch, deeply influenced Yeats's symbolical and imaginary system, determining its subsequent development up to its codification in the volume of A Vision. With WWB, Yeats was able to systematize for the first time his own thought, giving unity to his Weltanschauung and his poetry. Following this hypothesis, I concentrated on Yeats's and Ellis's numerous analyses dedicated to Blake's mythological and symbolical corpus and, in particular, I examined the last chapter of the first volume of the Quaritch edition. This chapter, entitled "The Symbolic System", constitutes an unquestionable link between Yeats the reader and scholar of Blake, and Yeats the poet and follower of Blake.

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“…"Littérature" is the "madness of the day" because it is obsessed by the "day"s" precondition which cannot appear in the "day". 34 The strangest thing is that this turn towards the other night happens at nightfall. That is, it is only with the passage to the Absolute that that the problem of the origin becomes infinitely aggravated.…”

“…It is in "littérature" that the modern text becomes tormented by the impossible demand of the other night. If Davies"s reading of "le drame solaire" suggests an accomplished resolution, a sunset 34 La folie du jour is the title of a short récit by Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1973). It was an important text for Jacques Derrida in his reading of Blanchot, See the essays collected in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986).…”

“…Mary is the mother of all, as is noted in the Latin preface, and the whole of womankind is united with Mary and Christ using Mary"s ambiguous position as a member of the human race and the divine family: "quod grande peccatum qui matrem 7 sororem matris Christi 7 matrem Christi occidit" ("for the sin is great when any one slays the mother and the sister of Christ"s mother and the mother of Christ"). 34 Mary"s part in the salvation of humanity is used as a model for a woman to be the instigator of women"s freedom reflecting the central Christian myth of humanity"s liberation, the Passion of Christ. In order that this sensitive yet powerful image can be utilized the author never directly addresses it but rather alludes to it in his presentation of the secular myth of the poet-outsider and his female initiator.…”

Xavier Herbert. Requiem for Genius

“…It is that it draws us into a process of identity formation whereby we become aware of how we experience nationality, depending on whether we are white or black or other, how we experience belonging or alienation or asylum, the states of being in between-and how that process affects who we really are, individually and as a collectivity. 97 If books are machines to think with, Herbert has much to tell us still about the social function and community value of art, the seductions of personality (individual and collective), and the difficulties of reconciliation. 45.…”

“…For Herbert, like Yeats, genius was the 'the central part of man' but it could be either enabled or disempowered by the 'mood of the world'; 26 the mood of Australia, as Herbert perceived it, was hostile to the hermeneutic of imagination by which the world might be healed and reconciled. In the boyhood of his autobiographical fiction, Disturbing Element, an Indian tea hawker and amateur phrenologist reads the bumps on his head and declares him a genius.…”