About the Cover
The cover illustration reproduces William Blake’s water-colored ink drawing, ‘The Reunion of the Soul & the Body,’ part of a set, published as engravings (not by Blake but by Luigi Schiavonetti) illustrating Robert Blair’s book-length poem, The Grave (1808). Departing from Blair’s conventional ideas, Blake’s series (long lost, but rediscovered in 2001), traces a progression from the initial descent into the Vale of Death to the admission into life eternal. But Blake not only emphasizes immortality over physical death; he depicts in this particular illustration the (male) body and (female) soul rushing passionately into ‘each other’s arms on the last day.’ The flames suggest that Blake’s reunion of soul and body incorporates Swedenborg’s vision of lovers, frustrated on earth, meeting in eternity in incandescent angelic intercourse.
This particular image and the Swedenborgian vision meant a great deal to Yeats. He used the engraved version of Blake’s illustration as the cover design for all three volumes of his (and Edwin Ellis’s) 1893 edition of Blake. Maud Gonne cited the Grave illustrations in a 1908 letter describing an astral projection in which she saw herself and Yeats spiritually entwined between heaven and earth. On the basis of his star-crossed love of Maud Gonne, Yeats came to believe, with Lucretius, that ‘the tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.’ Two decades after Maud told him of her astral projection, Yeats echoed and altered her purely spiritual concept in ‘A Last Confession,’ the ninth poem in his sequence A Woman Young and Old. In the two final stanzas the woman presents us with a characteristically Yeatsian vision of eroticized spirituality:
I gave what other women gave
That stepped out of their clothes,
But when this soul, its body off,
Naked to naked goes,
He it has found shall find therein
What none other knows,
And give his own and take his own
And rule in his own right;
And though it loved in misery
Close and cling so tight,
There’s not a bird of day that dare
Extinguish that delight.
Unsurprisingly, Yeats never forgot Blake’s ‘Reunion of the Soul & the Body.’ Four months before he died—in a letter written to one of his Muses, Ethel Mannin, but with Maud Gonne as ever hovering in the background—Yeats described Blake’s illustration of ‘the soul and body embracing’ as his own ‘idea of death.’
About the Author
Patrick J. Keane, former Francis Fallon Chair, is Professor Emeritus of Le Moyne College, where a medal in his name is annually awarded to graduating seniors in the Arts and Sciences who have ‘achieved excellence in the field of literary studies and who have demonstrated great scholarly promise.’ Though he has written on a wide range of topics, his areas of special interest are 19th and 20th-century poetry in the Romantic tradition; Irish literature and history; the interactions of literature with philosophic, religious, and political thought; the impact of Nietzsche on 20th century literature; and transatlantic studies, exploring the influence of German Idealist philosophy and British Romanticism on American writers.
He has written several dozen articles (the most recent of which have appeared in Salmagundi, The Mark Twain Annual, and the Yeats Annual) and seven books: William Butler Yeats: Contemporary Studies in Literature (1973), A Wild Civility: Interactions in the Poetry and Thought of Robert Graves (1980), Yeats’s Interactions with Tradition (1987), Terrible Beauty: Yeats, Joyce, Ireland and the Myth of the Devouring Female (1988), Coleridge’s Submerged Politics (1994), Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The Transatlantic ‘Light of All Our Day’ (2005), and Emily Dickinson’s Approving God: Divine Design and the Problem of Suffering (2008). He lives in De Witt, in upstate New York.
About the Team
Alessandra Tosi was the managing editor for this book.
Alison Gray performed the proofreading.
Melissa Purkiss performed the typesetting and indexing.
Anna Gatti designed the cover. The cover was produced in InDesign using the Fontin font.
Luca Baffa produced the paperback and hardback editions. The text font is Tex Gyre Pagella; the heading font is Californian FB. Luca produced the EPUB, MOBI, PDF, HTML, and XML editions — the conversion is performed with open source software freely available on our GitHub page (https://github.com/OpenBookPublishers).