Talk by Giorgio Melchiori
A passage in an early short story, Roso Alchemica , written in the 1890s, is the first indication of Yeats's interest in the art of Byzantium. For the next thirty years he makes no further reference to it; then, unexpectedly, Byzantine imagery emerges again in two of his most famous poems. Professor Melchiori, of the University of Turin, in suggesting an explanation for this sudden revival of interest, comments on the way in which a half-forgotten visual image may act as an imaginative stimulus.