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“Joyce acquits Blake peremptorily of the charges of insanity and vague mysticism: For the first, 'To say that a great genius is mad, is no better than to say he is a rheumatic or diabetic.' For the second, he was a mystic only insofar as he could be one and remain an artist; his mysticism was no swooning ecstasy like that of St. John of the Cross, but a western mysticism filled with an 'innate sense of form and the coordinating power of the intellect.” — Richard Ellmann
Joyce acquits Blake peremptorily of the charges of insanity and vague mysticism: For the first, 'To say that a great genius is mad, is no better than to say he is a rheumatic or diabetic.' For the second, he was a mystic only insofar as he could be one and remain an artist; his mysticism was no swooning ecstasy like that of St. John of the Cross, but a western mysticism filled with an 'innate sense of form and the coordinating power of the intellect.