The influence of the poet William Blake on the work of W.B. Yeats, Van Morrison, and James Joyce was so important as to warrant a substantial study on the matter, Tom Paulin claimed yesterday.
The Northern Irish poet and critic was speaking at the 42nd Yeats International Summer School.
Mr Paulin, lecturer in English at Hertford College in Oxford, told students at the Hawkswell theatre that the work of Blake was crucial to Yeats's whole enterprise. "Again and again, particularly in terms of vocabulary, you find resonance between the two poets."
Van Morrison, he went on, had invoked Blake's presence in the "extraordinary ferment which was Belfast of the 1960s". Blake had been seen as a very significant figure by the singer, who was drawn, like Yeats, to his "strain of Protestant radicalism".
Indeed, Van Morrison has made recordings of Blake's poetry, most notably America, where he does a rendition of passages in a kind of preacher's voice, which the passages demand to be spoken in.
Mr Paulin also claimed Blake represented in his poetry the struggle in the Protestant imagination between ideas of limitation and exultant energy. This "Calvinist conscience" had manifested itself in the current disagreements within the Ulster Unionist Party. Lines such as the "slave grinding at the mill" were images not only of the industrial revolution but also of that Calvinist conscience.
"Politicians like Jeffrey Donaldson and David Burnside represent the dark, constrictive, sceptical, Calvinist attitude seen in Blake's works.
"That dreadful, curtailing, limiting attitude of certain unionist politicians who are doing their damndest to overturn the peace agreement - that kind of struggle is there in Blake and Yeats."
Blake, he said, had been very much in Yeats's mind, particularly towards the end of his life. The themes of time and form in Yeats were very much influenced by Blake.
James Joyce too, he added, had many allusions to Blake in his works. Joyce, claimed Paulin, had read Blake through Yeats.
"Blake was a great liberating, imaginative force for Irish artists," he maintained.
Among the poems written by Blake which Yeats had been directly influenced by in his writings, claimed Mr Paulin, were The Tyger, Ah Sun-flower, and The Four Zoas. Among the most famous of Yeats's poems where Blake's attitudes were most evident were Sailing to Byzantium and The Lake Isle of Innisfree.