George Mills Harper, W. B. Yeats and W. T. Horton: The Record of a Friendship

Abstract

“His art is immature, but it is more interesting than the mature art of our magazines, for it is the reverie of a lonely and profound temperament.” With these words Yeats concluded his introduction to William Thomas Horton’s A Book of Images, published in 1898. In 1917, defending his omission of Horton and his work from the revised version of this essay, Yeats reiterated the belief that Horton’s talent was immature. In his turn, Horton consistently criticized Yeats’s obsession with spiritual investigation, withdrew from the Order of the Golden Dawn almost immediately after Yeats had sponsored his admission, and attacked him through visionary reports and more direct epistles for mingling poetry with philosophy.