Abstract
There has been a great deal of critical interest in W. B. Yeats’s and Edwin Ellis’s three volume collaborative edition, The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic and Critical, the so-called Quaritch edition.1 The reasons are evident enough. Yeats’s interest in Blake was life-long, and the themes and aesthetics of both poets are clearly compatible, when the differences expressed by such critics as Hazard Adams have been acknowledged.2 Furthermore, the Ellis-Yeats edition was the first to see Blake’s symbolic system as a whole, giving much attention to the difficult prophetic books, works neglected and even scorned by earlier editors such as Swinburne and Rpssetti. Finally, it was the first to print the text of The Four Zoas, albeit in a far from satisfactory fashion. For these reasons, the Works has been thoroughly discussed in a general way by a number of commentators. But opinions have differed rather widely as to the historical value this edition has for Blake scholarship. Focusing on its numerous textual errors, the editors’ doubtful emendations of Blake’s writings, and their penchant for arcane interpretations, one group of commentators tends to dismiss the Works as at best an interesting curiosity. Foremost among these is Northrop Frye.
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Notes
The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic and Critical, Edwin J. Ellis and William Butler Yeats (eds) 3 vols (London: Bernarcd Quaritch, 1893). In the text, references to this edition will appear hereafter as Works, citations as WWB.
Adams’s recent essay, “The Seven Eyes of Yeats”, in William Blake and the Moderns, Robert J. Bertholf and Annette S. Levitt (eds) (Albany: SUNY Press, 1982) pp. 3–14, offers a useful reassessment of the Blake/Yeats relationship as discussed in his well known study Blake and Yeats: the Contrary Vision (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955).
Northrop Frye, “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism”, Fables of Identity (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1963) pp. 231–2.
Kathleen Raine, “Yeats’s Debt to William Blake”, Defending Ancient Springs (London: Oxford University Press, 1969) p. 73.
Deborah Dorfman, Blake in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969) p. 226.
Ian Fletcher, “The Ellis-Yeats-Blake Manuscript Cluster”, The Book Collector 21 (1972) 72–94.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (London: William Blake, c. 1790–3; rept London: J. C. Hotten, 1868). Textual references to this reprint edition will appear as “Hotten facsimile”. We are grateful to Professor David Erdman for making this identification for us.
Subsequent references to this work will appear as MHH; references to MHH as text will be to The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. edn, David V. Erdman, scommentary Harold Bloom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). In-text citations to this standard edition will be made as Erd.
Yeats was reading and marking the two volumes of Swedenborg’s The Principia after 1912.
See also Yeats’s “Swedenborg, Mediums and the Desolate Places” (1914) in Ex.
The Morley edition of Robinson’s “Reminiscences” varies somewhat from Yeats’s presentation: “ ‘He was a divine teacher; he has done much and will do much good; he has corrected many errors of Popery, and also of Luther and Calvin.’ Yet he also said that Swedenborg was wrong in endeavouring to explain to the rational faculty what the reason cannot comprehend;” Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, Edith J. Morley (ed.) (London: J. M. Dent, 1938) i, 327.
Yeats’s comment appears at the bottom of p. 32 in his own copy of Denis Saturat’s Blake and Modem Thought (London: Constable, 1929).
At p. 1, paragraph 8 of the Arcana Yeats has written: “Compare second book of Los”; in Hartmann, The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme, The God Taught Philosopher (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1891) p. 128 at par. 1 his annotation reads “Compare Book of Los, Chapter 2 and the differentiation of the ‘element.’ Compare Blake’s Dark Hermaphrodite.”
See S. Foster Damon, “The Book of Urizen”. A Blake Dictionary (Providence: Brown University Press, 1965).
The Illuminated Blake, annotated by David V. Erdman (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1974) p. 15.
Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Blake: a Critical Essay (1867; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967) p. 204.
Harold Bloom’s commentary in Erdman’s Complete Writings follows Ellis and Yeats in recognising that Blake saw in Paradise Lost “a falsification of the relation between human desire and the idea of Holiness”, p. 897. Northrop Frye, in Fearful Symmetry (1947); rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967, p. 118), echoes Ellis’s and Yeats’s comment to the effect that “without imaginative truth” man forms a false image of heaven. He notes in his commentary on MHH that “The essential truth of religion can be presented only in its essential form, which is that of imaginative vision.”
William M. Murphy in Prodigal Father: the Life of John Butler Yeats (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978) p. 67, describes J. B. Y.’s enthusiasm for Blake’s work which he shared in conversations with Edwin Ellis. Perhaps this annotation points to J. B. Y. as the source for this reading of “The Argument”.
Yeats’s poem “The Moods” (first published August, 1893) and a short essay with the same title (1895) both suggest that “moods” with their origins in the imagination are not evanescent but timeless and permanent. They are the sources of all art (an idea emphasised also in Rosa Alchemica, VSR 143, ll. 469–81); and in a specifically Blakean context, Yeats opposes them to “the restraints of reason” E & I 195, VP 142. See also the useful discussion of “The Moods” in Allen R. Grossman, Poetic Knowledge in the Early Yeats (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969) pp. 67–75.
See for example A. Norman Jeffares, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968) pp. 43–6;.
Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (New York: Vintage Books, 1964) pp. 96–100.
Other commentators point up the similarities between this plate and Blake’s print “The Good and Evil Angels”. See The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Geoffrey Keynes (ed.) (London: Oxford University Press, 1975) commentary for plate 4.
Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964) p. 76.
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© 1985 Warwick Gould
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Masterson, D., O’Shea, E. (1985). Code Breaking and Myth Making: the Ellis-Yeats Edition of Blake’s Works. In: Gould, W. (eds) Yeats Annual No. 3. Yeats Annual. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06206-5_4
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