Genius and madness mirrored: Rossetti’s and yeats’ reception of William Blake

Abstract

It took over a hundred for the oeuvre of William Blake to be fully appreciated both for its thought and form. Nineteenth-century historians of literature, interpreters and fellow poets, struggled to comprehend his work, which attempts were rarely rewarded with success. The nineteenth-century critics saw in Blake a “genius tinctured with madness,” a “strange” poet, or a poet lacking the means of expression, literally “illiterate.” Those differences in opinion resulted from an apparent incongruity in Blake’s work which combines a striking simplicity of style with philosophical profundity and imaginative scope. His critics saw his imperfections and were struck by his genius. But his genius was not easy to explain; among those who tried, the most prominent were D. G. Rossetti, and W. B. Yeats. This paper aims at sketching the vicissitudes of Rossetti’s and Yeats’s attempts to make Blake’s work accessible to a wider readership. And since the “mark” of genius, as stated by Arthur Koestler, is in “opening of the new frontiers,” rather than in “perfection,” some intellectual daring, rather than flawlessness, was needed of his interpreters. Such were the intellectual adventures of Rossetti and Yeats: Rossetti, by imitating Blake’s style, put his own reputation at stake, and Yeats, by seeing his own esoteric system mirrored in Blake’s, not infrequently erred. Finally, then, this paper specifies where they succeeded and where they failed by asserting or denying their own spark of genius in the realm of interpreting.