The Demon and the Angel

I've been forced to think a good deal lately about daimons and demons,  gods and angels, which leads me always to Lorca and Rilke. And much to my surprise and delight, I have happened upon another little gem of a book in which Corbin and the mundus imaginalis figure prominently. Here we find Lorca, Rilke, Ibn Arabi, Yeats, Keats and a host of others in a small tour-de-force on the sources of creative imagination.

The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration, by Edward Hirsch.

Hirsch writes,

"It is helpful to think of the mundus imaginalis as a transcendence deployed in language. It is the specific place where St. John of the Cross composes his Spiritual Canticles, where Arthur Rimbaud enters a rational delirium and Hart Crane systematically deranges the senses, where Gerard de Nerval formulates visions and Robert Desnos simulates trances, where William Blake canonizes voices and Samuel Taylor Coleridge troubles dreams, where W. B. Yeats listens to unknown instructors speaking through his wife's unconscious and James Merrill contacts spirits through a Ouija board, where Wallace Stevens imagines that God the the imagination are One and Rainer Maria Rilke starts taking dictation from angels." (p. 108)