Mythology and Modernism

Many years ago I attended a poetry read­ing by my friend Cyn­thia LeClaire. This was the pen name for a woman who had a Ph.D. from the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago, who taught phi­los­o­phy at a col­lege here in New York, and who was pur­su­ing another degree in Clas­sics at the C.U.N.Y. Grad­u­ate Cen­ter. Cyn­thia and I had become acquainted dur­ing a Greek poetry sem­i­nar at the lat­ter school.

A great many of Cynthia’s poems had mytho­log­i­cal themes and allu­sions. She loved the old sto­ries and made free use of them in var­ied ways. When the read­ing was over, she fielded a few ques­tions from the audience.

One came from a hos­tile lis­tener. He was a hulk­ing oaf in a plaid shirt, dun­ga­rees, work boots, and a SANE but­ton. He iden­ti­fied him­self as “Jerry,” and as the direc­tor of a poetry work­shop at some com­mu­nity college.

“Why are you writ­ing about these old myths?” Jerry snarled. “Couldn’t you find some­thing more rel­e­vant to our times?” He empha­sized the word rel­e­vant in that accusatory way that a lot of faux rad­i­cals did back then. “I mean,” Jerry added, “it’s not as if this stuff was con­tem­po­rary.” He then folded his arms and smirked, Oxford-Debating-Union style.

Cyn­thia looked at him and sniffed. She was from the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago, and a dis­ci­ple of Allan Bloom. She had noth­ing but con­tempt for left-liberal morons. “The myths are rel­e­vant to me,” she enun­ci­ated with pre­ci­sion, “and I hap­pen to be a con­tem­po­rary.” I imme­di­ately clapped loudly, and con­tin­ued until a wave of applause was gen­er­ated from the audi­ence. Jerry in his plaid shirt kept quiet for the rest of the session.

This lit­tle inci­dent is mean­ing­ful because the atti­tude expressed by Jerry has, in my expe­ri­ence, only become more wide­spread and vir­u­lent over the years. Among many poets and edi­tors there is a vis­ceral loathing of any ref­er­ence in a poem not just to myth but to any­thing his­tor­i­cal, learned, lit­er­ary, or arcane—in short, to any­thing that is not part of the imme­di­ate per­sonal expe­ri­ence of the poet. Some of this is due to the long-standing hege­mony of the con­fes­sional lyric, with its fix­a­tion on the authen­tic and the first-hand. And some of it is due to despair—nobody learns this stuff any­more, say poets, so why the hell should we men­tion it? How­ever, some of it is also due to a knee­jerk Amer­i­can pop­ulism that fiercely resents intel­lec­tual achieve­ment and aes­thetic intri­cacy as elit­ist and undemocratic.

Just recently a poet and edi­tor for whom I have great respect wrote to me say­ing that he had elim­i­nated a num­ber of poems from his forth­com­ing book, on the grounds that they con­tained ref­er­ences that many read­ers would prob­a­bly not under­stand. I was appalled at this deci­sion, and wrote back that it was absurd for him to immo­late the prod­ucts of his art on the altar of our failed edu­ca­tional sys­tem. But he was adamant. He wrote to me “The audi­ences of tomor­row will know who Jesus Christ was. They will know who Her­cules, Ulysses and Achilles were. But to pre­tend that they will know or care about the more eso­teric sub­jects of Greek mythol­ogy is sheer folly.”

After read­ing his words, I real­ized what a ter­ri­ble thing is was to be obsessed with audi­ence and reader-response, and how dam­ag­ing to one’s art such an obses­sion can be. Imag­ine dis­card­ing an intrin­si­cally good poem on the hypo­thet­i­cal grounds that Joe Blow or Doris Dum­b­cunt might not under­stand it fully. Is a poem like an Alka-Seltzer com­mer­cial? Does it have to appeal to “the Wad,” as TV adver­tis­ers call the low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor of viewers?

Besides pop­ulism, the Bar­baric Yawp, and a gen­er­al­ized sense of futil­ity, another enemy that poets lit­er­ate in mythol­ogy must face is the notion that the old myths are “played out” or “dead” or “ster­ile.” The argu­ment goes some­thing like this: The myths may have been valid and mean­ing­ful in the past, but they have long since become fos­silized relics, use­less to any poet seek­ing to express the tenor of our times.

This argu­ment is pred­i­cated on the notion that inher­ited mythol­ogy is some­how canon­i­cally fixed, like the text of Petrarch or the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence. But that is sim­ply untrue. Mythol­ogy was always a liv­ing thing in the ancient world. The old sto­ries were retold so many times that it was pretty much expected every poet uti­liz­ing a myth would vary it in some idio­syn­cratic way, either to suit the work at hand or to sat­isfy his per­sonal pref­er­ences. No clas­si­cal writer tells the exact same story as it appears in Hes­iod or the other early mythog­ra­phers. Pin­dar some­times rewrote an inher­ited myth in accor­dance with his own sense of pro­pri­ety; and Ovid refash­ioned sto­ries in what­ever man­ner he pleased. That isn’t a sign of steril­ity or hide­bound con­ser­vatism. That’s a sign of vigor and fruitfulness.

In fact, in late antiq­uity Graeco-Roman mythol­ogy had become so com­plex and pro­tean that even edu­cated per­sons needed hand­books like the Pseudo-Apollodorus in Greek or Hygi­nus in Latin to keep up with the bewil­der­ing num­ber of sto­ries and their vari­ants. These hand­books or enchiridia were the Cliff’s Notes of the time, allow­ing read­ers to get some kind of a han­dle on what had become a jun­gle of inter­twined and con­flict­ing narratives.

That sort of com­plex­ity is highly use­ful. It means that myths are a mix of dis­parate and con­flict­ing things, just as C.G. Jung imag­ined the col­lec­tive uncon­scious to be. Or to use a home­lier image, they are like the con­tents of a catch-all drawer in someone’s kitchen or workshop—a drawer filled with a jum­ble of tools, uten­sils, and odds and ends. You can always find some­thing there to serve your purpose.

The same thing can be true today. Myths can be cat­a­lysts for a wide range of new ideas and imag­i­na­tive re-creations. They don’t have to be another strum­ming of the same old chords. In fact, they can sig­nal a rebirth and rein­vig­o­ra­tion of cul­ture, as hap­pens in Pound’s 1913 “The Return,” a mag­nif­i­cent piece on the com­ing back of the gods:

See, they return; ah, see the ten­ta­tive
Move­ments, and the slow feet,
The trou­ble in the pace and the uncer­tain
Waver­ing!
…

These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe,”
Invi­o­lable.
Gods of the wingèd shoe!

This is a daz­zling poem on the reflow­er­ing in Euro­pean con­scious­ness of its clas­si­cal roots, and of that con­scious­ness wak­ing up from the stu­pid dreams of ratio­nal­ism and Enlight­en­ment pieties. Once again in the West, the pri­mal forces of blood, instinct, his­tory, and sac­ri­fice were ris­ing, and Pound’s poem both records and cel­e­brates this phenomenon.

Frankly, any­one who says that mythol­ogy is a dead end for mod­ern writ­ers hasn’t read a lot of mod­ern lit­er­a­ture. Jean Anouilh retold the story of Antigone in wartime France, mak­ing it intensely rel­e­vant to con­tem­po­rary issues of state author­ity, tyranny, and the lim­its of obe­di­ence. Rilke’s Son­nets to Orpheus is indis­sol­ubly linked to Greek myth. Paddy Chayef­sky in Gideon took the myth­i­cal Hebrew hero of that name and sub­verted his story into a med­i­ta­tion on mod­ern man’s need to assert inde­pen­dence of God. Derek Wal­cott used Home­ric epic to con­fig­ure a story set in his island home of St. Lucia. John Crowe Ransom’s remark­able poem “Philomela” takes the Procne and Philomela story and makes it a cat­a­lyst for a med­i­ta­tion on the fail­ure of mod­ern Amer­i­can poetry. Or con­sider Archibald MacLeish’s mag­nif­i­cent refash­ion­ing of the Job tale in his verse drama J.B. I’ll never for­get how pow­er­fully that story affected me as a teenager in high school, when I read the stark scrip­tural account res­ur­rected with images of juve­nile delin­quency, drug addic­tion, street crime, and all the other gritty real­i­ties of New York life. Mythol­ogy a dead end? Tell that to James Joyce when he was com­pos­ing the chap­ter titles for Ulysses.

The crux of the issue, in my opin­ion, lies not in mythol­ogy per se but in the man­ner in which allu­sion or ref­er­ence is han­dled. And here again, as in so many of the struc­tural prob­lems that plague con­tem­po­rary poetry, the dif­fi­culty is rooted in mod­ernist quirks. When Ten­nyson wrote Idylls of the King, he used Arthurian leg­end in a straight­for­ward and com­pre­hen­si­ble way. The sto­ries that he retold were clear and rec­og­niz­able. He may have var­ied them a bit (as all sto­ry­tellers do) in order to make what­ever point or cre­ate what­ever aes­thetic effect he had in mind. But no one could have com­plained to him that his Idylls were unin­tel­li­gi­ble or cryptic.

Mod­ernism changed all that. Many mod­ernists turned allu­sion and ref­er­ence into an intel­lec­tu­al­ized ver­sion of the old board game “Clue.” You didn’t tell an old myth; you hinted at it. You indi­rectly pointed at some­thing in a way that might (or might not) be grasped by an intel­li­gent reader. Poetry became cir­cum­spect and coy.

There are two genetic fac­tors in mod­ernism that led to this sea change. The first is the “show-don’t-tell” dogma, which is still repeated as a mantra in poetry work­shops run by Jerry and his ilk. Orig­i­nat­ing in a laud­able desire to purge poetry of overly-discursive wordi­ness, this dogma has now become a choke-hold on cre­ative expres­sion. In the case of mythol­ogy, it forced poets to dis­pense with the telling of an old tale, and instead touch upon it obliquely, with a wink at your sup­pos­edly knowl­edge­able reader.

The sec­ond genetic fac­tor is the pro­gram­matic cryp­ti­cism of mod­ernism, trace­able to its assump­tion that poetry is some­thing rar­efied and quin­tes­sen­tial. I dis­cussed this notion at length in my arti­cle “Poetry as the Philoso­phers’ Stone” at the Expan­sive Poetry On-Line web­site some years ago. If you believe that poetry is some­thing pre­cious and tiny, like a gram of pure radium, then you’re not going to have the space to do any­thing with a myth except make a glanc­ing nod towards it.

Let’s look at two twentieth-century poems that make use of myth, and see how they work. There’s enough of a dif­fer­ence between them to give a foren­sic pro­file of how mod­ernism has changed our myth-recounting pro­ce­dures. And to avoid any recrim­i­na­tions, I’ll start by say­ing that both poems are excel­lent. I won’t quote them in full here, since they are well known and eas­ily accessible.

The first is Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” This son­net retells the myth of how the princess Leda was raped by Zeus, and how that act led to the hatch­ing forth of Helen and Clytemnes­tra, and then to the hor­rors of the Tro­jan War. The cru­cial pas­sage is this:

A shud­der in the loins engen­ders there
The bro­ken wall, the burn­ing roof and tower
And Agamem­non dead.

The poem is per­fectly clear. The rape of Leda will pro­duce the two women who will be the focal points of future tragedy: Helen, whose ter­ri­fy­ing beauty will moti­vate her abduc­tion and the ulti­mate destruc­tion of Troy; and her sis­ter Clytemnes­tra, who will mur­der her hus­band Agamem­non upon his return from Troy. There isn’t any­thing vague or cryp­tic or hier­at­i­cally aloof about this poem. Like Ten­nyson, Yeats is sim­ply retelling the old story with­out tricks, though of course he uses the story to make a very mod­ern point about uncertainty.

Now con­sider Eliot’s “Sweeney Among the Nightin­gales,” another poem that alludes to the death of Agamem­non. The poem is intro­duced by an untrans­lated epi­graph from Aeschy­lus, giv­ing Agamemnon’s last words as he is mur­dered. Already we are in the murky world of mod­ernist ret­i­cence, where some­thing is silently ges­tured at, as if any fur­ther expla­na­tion were some­how uncool or clumsy. Can’t han­dle the Greek? Well, tough luck, accord­ing to modernism.

The poem itself, how­ever, doesn’t seem to deal with Agamem­non at all, at least not imme­di­ately. It’s a descrip­tion of someone’s visit to a seedy whore­house, and of the per­sons whom he meets there. The Sweeney of the poem’s title, who pre­sum­ably is the vis­i­tor, is Eliot’s name of con­ve­nience for the dull, cul­ture­less mass-man of mod­ern times, the ordi­nary slob, the homme moyen sen­suel who lives for noth­ing but his momen­tary fleshly plea­sures. He goes to the whore­house, deals with some of the bedrag­gled girls, and judi­ciously avoids rob­bery by those who run the house, since this is clearly a low haunt where clients get pick­pock­eted or mugged. The poem ends with two absolutely lumi­nous quatrains:

The host with some­one indis­tinct
Con­verses at the door apart,
The nightin­gales are singing near
The Con­vent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamem­non cried aloud
And let their liq­uid sift­ings fall
To stain the stiff, dis­hon­ored shroud.

Here we have the con­fla­tion or tele­scop­ing of the whore­house story with the Agamem­non myth. The “host” (the brothel keeper) speaks with “some­one indis­tinct” (per­haps an arriv­ing client, but more likely a hired thug), while the “nightin­gales” (pros­ti­tutes) are singing near the “Con­vent of the Sacred Heart,” a sym­bol of the purity and asceti­cism that their degra­da­tion mocks. These images of sex­ual cor­rup­tion and planned crime sug­gest the plot of Clytemnes­tra and her lover Aegisthus to slaugh­ter Agamem­non, and the final vision of birds drop­ping their excre­ment on his “dis­hon­ored shroud” ties every­thing together (whores, birds, mur­der, filth, dis­honor, the vio­la­tion of purity) into a com­plex nod­ule of lin­guis­tic tight­ness that the mod­ernists favored—in this case, a nod­ule that cre­ates an unfor­get­table poetic expres­sion of the squalor and cheesi­ness of mod­ern life, and how it betrays a noble and heroic past.

Does it work? Yes, of course—a genius like Eliot could make it work. But notice how much is expected of the reader, from that untrans­lated Greek epi­gram to the oblique and almost casual ref­er­ence in the final qua­train. This is the sort of mytho­log­i­cal allu­sion that can leave read­ers frus­trated and impa­tient. But then again, apart from his book about cats, Eliot has always been “caviare to the gen­eral,” as Ham­let said.

The pro­ce­dure of Yeats in “Leda and the Swan” is tra­di­tional and essen­tially lucid. But Yeats learned his poetic craft in the nine­teenth cen­tury. It was only later in life that he tried to cre­ate those “nod­ules of lin­guis­tic tight­ness” char­ac­ter­is­tic of mod­ernism. Eliot, on the other hand, set the pat­tern for the oblique and glanc­ing use of mythic allu­sion, a prac­tice that many read­ers find exasperating.

Now I’m not blam­ing Eliot in any way. It’s not a poet’s job to cater to his hypo­thet­i­cal read­er­ship. And I wouldn’t trade a mas­ter­piece like “Sweeney Among the Nightin­gales” for a hun­dred “acces­si­ble” poems in Basic Eng­lish. But I think it impor­tant to see, from the exam­ple of these two poems, that read­ers’ resent­ment of mytho­log­i­cal ref­er­ences is due more to the pro­ce­dures and styl­is­tic tics of mod­ernism than to any­thing at fault in mythol­ogy itself. If Bullfinch can make mythol­ogy acces­si­ble to all, then poets can too. It’s sim­ply that mod­ernism had an agenda of hier­atic aloof­ness, ellip­ti­cal phras­ing, and mys­tery, and this agenda did a lot of what the mil­i­tary calls “col­lat­eral dam­age.” We’ve only begun to clean up the mess.

If poets are to use myth effec­tively, it might be a good start­ing point to rec­og­nize that myths are above all com­mon prop­erty, and not the pri­vate domain of a snob­bish fra­ter­nity of ini­ti­ates. Mod­ernism has already alien­ated enough poten­tial read­ers with its sti­fled rhetoric and pared-down dic­tion. And here I exclude the great mod­ernists like Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and a few oth­ers. I mean the camp-followers of mod­ernism, who are now the Poetry Estab­lish­ment. Can we at least keep mythol­ogy as a pat­ri­mony for every­one, and one that we can make eas­ily avail­able to all poten­tial read­ers, even the ones who are unfa­mil­iar with it? After all, not every­one who read Tennyson’s Idylls of the King knew Mal­ory; and not every­one who read I, Claudius by Robert Graves knew Sue­to­nius. But Ten­nyson and Graves were gen­er­ous enough to open the gates for those people.

Will every­one wel­come the myth-telling poet? No, of course not. The sys­tem­atic anti-intellectualism of types like Jerry will always be with us, but then again, when was it ever oth­er­wise? Nev­er­the­less, we don’t have to be com­plicit with that stance, which is what hap­pens if we write with the unde­mo­c­ra­tic assump­tion that myths are for the cho­sen few. Do that, and Jerry wins.