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. Keywords.