My first encounter with Blake was through the illustrations to his illuminated books. It was the human element in them that fascinated me. I could see Blake’s mistakes, his brushwork, his alterations. His artist’s hand was so visible in the work he seemed alive still beyond the grave. This itself was almost akin to a spiritual experience for me. Each variation in his prints, whether intended or not, emphasised something different and instantly changed the painting’s mood. A plant shrivelled from lush to barren, a tiger’s eyes flashed between sleepy and menacing, a shadow crept over a man’s face and obscured his features. My initial response to Blake was visceral and immediate, rather than intellectual.
I didn’t plan to work on Yeats at first. A friend of mine was working on an undergraduate dissertation on Blake and A Vision and getting increasingly worn out as term neared its end. In an attempt to understand Yeats’ symbols, he pasted Yeats’ occult diagrams all over his walls. Instead of bestowing visionary insight, the gyres spun silently above his head and gave him no answers (though I should say here all ended well for my friend and he passed his dissertation). It seemed that Yeats was a dead artist full of cryptic secrets because he remade himself in the image of Blake. I asked myself, was Blake, then, also an esotericist?
Years later, having completed my PhD, my attitude towards both authors changed completely. My scope widened to consider what Blake represented to Yeats’s circle of fellow mystic-artists. I explored what it means to be called a ‘mystic’ or ‘esoteric’ artist. Is it in the lineage of influence, or in the practice? Is it working with a set of personal symbols, as Yeats did? Perhaps automatic writing and drawing, like George Yeats? Or maybe giving artistic form to visions, to women with wings watching you from the corner of your room, as George Russell, alias ‘Æ’, did? While each figure I’ve researched for my PhD (only some of whom I’ve listed above) knew Blake’s works, each interpreted and drew from him differently. Blake, in his time, blended the influences of millenarian prophets with seventeenth-century alchemy. Yeats and his circle in turn melded Blake with their then-contemporary influences such as Theosophy, or the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Each artist, according to their personal vision, background, and circumstances, interpreted Blake differently, even despite being members of the same esoteric groups.
Many of the authors and artists I wrote about are neglected in literary and artistic history: my thesis presented the first time they were brought together and considered as a group. I presented the concept of ‘influence’ not as the imposition of one artist’s style onto another, but rather as the spirit of interconnection, creating a dialogue between artists. This approach of mine attempted to shift the balance of cultural history, to place the well-known next to the obscure and observe the connections. At times, reading many mystic texts, chasing up references, running across Bloomsbury, I felt like I was searching for the meaning of life itself. Later on, my approach became less frantic. I no longer saw Blake, or anyone I worked on, as an esoteric puzzle to be solved. My PhD actually reversed that assumption of mine, which I’d absorbed from Yeats. Studying Blake all these years, I’ve realised that sometimes people believe spiritual things are complicated because they don’t fully understand them. Some people are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of invisible forces they can’t control, Yeats included. I found the best way to approach spiritually inspired art is to simply look at what’s in front of you. Sometimes, the answers are in plain sight.
Jodie Marley
January 2023
Jodie Marley is a PhD graduate from the University of Nottingham, funded by the Centre for Regional Literature and Culture. Her research examines William Blake’s reception as a mystic by W. B. Yeats, George Russell, and Fiona Macleod. She has published articles in VALA and The John Rylands Library Bulletin.