Abstract
William Thomas Horton began to study oil-painting and chalk-drawing on October 3, 1893.1 He was twenty-nine years old and had already tried his hand in several fields. Horton was born in Brussels on June 27, 1864 and spent most of his childhood there; his family later moved to Brighton, where he attended the Brighton Grammar School. He then worked for a Brighton architect and studied building-construction at a local art school.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Most of the biographical details in this essay are taken from William Thomas Horton (1864–1919): A Selection of His Work with a Biographical Sketch by Roger Ingpen (London: Ingpen and Grant, [1929]). There are comments on Horton in various studies of Yeats, including Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats, 1865–1939, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1962), esp. pp. 281–82.
Virginia Moore, The Unicom: William Butler Yeats’ Search for Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1954), esp. pp. 234–35.
Earl Miner, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), pp. 236–37.
Giorgio Melchiori, The Whole Mystery of Art: Pattern into Poetry in the Work of W.B. Yeats (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), esp. pp. 21–22.
By far the most significant account is the lucid commentary on Horton’s art by D. G. Gordon and Ian Fletcher in W. B. Yeats: Images of a Poet (Manchester University Press, 1961), pp. 101–03.
The unsigned note to the Horton materials in the Bodleian states that he also contributed to The Evergreen, but we have been unable to locate any of Horton’s work in either The New Evergreen: The Christmas Book of University Hall (1894) or The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal (1895–97).
From a letter to Leonard Smithers, dated February-March 1896 in The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, ed. Henry Maas, J. L. Duncan, and W. G. Good (Rutherford, Madison, and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970), p. 115.
This date is established by a letter to Bullen on June 27, 1902, in The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), pp. 398–99.
In an essay about “Yeats’ s Arabic Interests”, S. B. Bushrui maintains that “ The Way of the Soul not only provided Yeats with half of his title, but also influenced his working out of some of the ideas expressed in A Vision” (A. Norman Jefiares and K. G. W. Cross, eds., In Excited Reverie [New York: Macmillan, 1965], p. 302).
(See Herbert W. Schneider and George Lawton, A Frophet and a Pilgrim [New York: Columbia University Press, 1942], for a detailed account of Harris’s “incredible history”.)
An illustration to Matthew 7.14 in The Savoy, No. 2 (April 1896): 77.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 1975 Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Finneran, R.J., Harper, G.M. (1975). “ He loved strange thought”: W. B. Yeats and William Thomas Horton. In: Harper, G.M. (eds) Yeats and the Occult. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02937-2_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02937-2_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-02939-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-02937-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)