Yeats, A Vision, and Art History

Abstract

Yeats worried that his poetry might be destroyed if he wandered too far down what he called the hodos chameliontos, the chameleon road, in which the imagination became so replete, overstimulated, that it kept producing images in such profusion that the images became unintelligible. In a number of passages deleted from his plays, we can see Yeats experimenting with these wild profusions of images. In the art historical writings he studied, Yeats found visual analogues to the hodos chameliontos in the world of Persian art.