Myth and legend in post-war English poetry - eTheses Repository

361 Pages·2012·17.78 MB·English

MYTH AND LEGEND
IN POST-WAR ENGLISH POETRY
f
Ph
D THESlrS.
Department of English.
·FaOlHty of Arts.
University of Birmingha
1980.
University of Birmingham Research Archive

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To my parents.
\
STIIOPSIS
The thesis investigates both how and why many of the best post-war poets have
moved back to use m;y-th and legend just when they seemed finally discredited.
Chapter One briefly discusses the various scholarly theories of myth, and
sharpens the critical terminology to be employed. It descriQes the personal myth-
systems of Yeats, Graves and Lm;rence and, conversely, the four systems most
generally used by modern poets.
The follovTing four chapters study, in turn, four major approaches to the use
2
of myth in poetry. Chapter sh011s how Seamus Heaney s work employs legend as
t
archetype; the history of Ulster being erected as a metaphor to illuminate
ti~eless
the present Troubles. Chapter Three takes the poetry of Geoffrey Hil: an
~s
example of the development of neuly created legend, culminating with that centred
on King Offa of Mercia. Chapter Four examines Thom Gunn' s use of myth as archetype,
showing how the timeless can be given contemporary force, either through existential
philosophy or Californian psychedelia. Chapter Five explores Ted Hughes' creation
of a new myth, a nevT reality, the cr01'ming achievement.
Chapter Six discusses i'lhy myth is still relevant, distinguishing its careful
adoption into four modern stylistic traditions and its four major modes of relevance.
Legend is seen as a form of place, myth as a form of time, and the best new poetry
is recognised as utilizing both, a surprise invocation of the White Goddess.
Number of words = c 98,000.
CON TEN T S.
CHAPrER ONE: MYTH .AN]) POETRY. I.
CHAnER TFO: LEGENn AS ARCHETYPE: THE POETRY OF SEANUS HEANEY.
CHAPrER THREE, A NEW LEGEND: THE POETRY OF GEOFFREY HILL.
CHAPrER FOOR: MYTH AS ARCHETYPE: THE POETRY OF THOM GUNlT. I73.
CHAPrER FIVE: A NEH MYTH: THE POETRY OF TED hLTGHES. 28I.
3IT.
CHAPrER SIX: POETRY AND MYTH.
319.
SELECT BIBLI~APhl.
C HAP T E BO ~ ~.
MYTH AND POE TRY.
'As an art in itself (Poetry) is, first of all, essentially mythological
••• It is to the poetry of mythology and not to either science or
religion, that owe that vast obscure cosmic emotion that stirs Fi thin
1~e
I
us and gives us back the childhood of our race' •
'In the dominion of myths can short circuit the intellect' 2.
1{e
I.
In an early essay, 'Ulysses, Order and Myth', T.S.Eliot praised James Joyce
for having invented a way, through myth, of creating a 'continuous parallel'
between past and present, through 1-Thich a modern "Triter (Eliot himself?) can impart
'a shape and a significance to the immense panaroma of futility.' and
anarchy- 1-1hich is contemporary- history' 3.
In the early 1970' s, just vihen such rnythologising seemed to be utterly discredited _
4
the 'common myth-kitty' made infamous by Larkin now apparently sidestepped for
chilly reality - four major poems appeared uhich, though united by little else, used
myth or legendl to achieve just such' sha.pe' aHd 'significance'. Seamus Heaney's
North and Geoffrey Hill's Mercicm Hypms take nati va legend to define the poet s own
t
relationship both to the past and his community. Modern problems of fear and
dislocation, 'futility and anarchy-' ~ :ITe refracted: by ~ loca1 folklore which
Heaney- rediscovers and Hill reinvents. Similar].y, Thom Gunnfs Noiy- and Ted Hughes'
Crow take more generalised myth - rediscovered by Gunn, reinvented by Hughes - to
explore "contemporary history' and discern new perceptions, a nevT sense of violence.
1
Row myth and legend again achieved relev~~ce is the subject of this study.
The scholarly investigation of myth is a vastly tangled field, ane of little
direct relevance to -the literary historian. As such a modern 'state of the art'
anthology as Pierre Miranda'S ~~holo£l5 shows, myth has become the preserve of
statisticians and psychologists, and yet it remains essentially inexplicable.
'I know very vTell what it is, provided that nobody asks me: but if I
am asked and try to explain, I am baffled 16.
The surest path into this quaqmire is a short, masterly accoQ~t by Northrop Frye,
which I can do no better than paraphrase. A myth is essentially a story about a
god. It develops from an oral, communal tradition', a~d myths differ from folk tales
only because they are organised into the more complicated structure 'of a mythology. ~
Such a mythology attempts to explain the creation of a complex society. It t'Lus
often also produces a theogony, a chronicle of the gods from their origins to the
present day,&~d constantly is revised to fit the changing needs of the society from
which it arises. In just such a 1-ray, modern society has continually redefined its
theories of myth itself; and these conflicting viewpoints have, in turn, variously:
informed the u~~es made of myth by poets, ri1~ers--Jof< their O'-Tn secondary vTor-lds. I
shall take the oeven major theories of myth in their historical order.
2.
The earliest, and most obvious, interpretation of myth was that it is ancient
8
history transcribed, 'the gods you worship 'Ifere once men' • This view provided an
9
easy weapon for later Christian apologists, of whom the Sicilian Euhemerus gave
it his name. His lost Sacred History supposedly-revealed that both Kronos and
Zeus were merely kings of Crete, not Creation. More sinister was the way in which
this theory could be reversed, and thus used to trace present autocrats back to the
goas. The most striking examples here include Virgil's glorification of Rome and
IO
Augustus in the Aeneid , the early Tudors' attempt to trace their origins in
II
l-!'elsh Arthurian myth , and Elizabeth I' s subsequent self-identification vri th Diana
12
and Astraea • More recently, the historian has been seen, ironically, as himself
a myth maker, extrapolating "res gestae' - the reality of history - from 'historia
l3
rE'~'.l1II gestarum' - the accounts which survi ve • Allied to this is the idea of
myth i tsclf as a 'para-history', accompanying real history but recording
'not what happened but what people, at different times, said or
believed had happened,I4.
If sober historiro1s are only concocting fictions, then a poet's version. of the
past is no less true, indeed more emotionally coherent, because such imagination is
overt. Mercian'Hymps, therefore, is a more complex achievement than any- lineal
historical survey of the Midlands, a better myth, a more realistic legend.
The main rival to euhemerism as a portmanteau theory ,Tas that myth is a kind
of primitive science, a structuring of the natur& ·world. 'All metamorphoses are
the physics of the early ages', Ovid's poem is a manual of alchemical, hidden
I5
knoi.rledge • The folly of reducing myth to such a secret langu2.ge was satirised
by Ben Jonson in The Alchemist, an attack on such cloudy, misleading rhetoric.
'Both this, th'Hesperian Garden, Cadmus' story
Jove's shower, the boon of Midas, Argus' eyes,
Boccace's Demogorgon, thousands more
All abstract riddles of our Stone,l6.
An offshoot- of this, scme theory ,las the idea of aetiologyI7. Myths '\-Tere rega=ded
here as mistaken explanatj.ons of phenomena, vJhether of human life or external
l8
nature • Poets proved eager to plunder such. intriguing narratives, the fanciful
invention of origins, whether in the stately playfulness of courtly epillin -
'Therefore in sign her treasure suffered wrack,
Since Hero's time hath half the ,,;orld been black,I9 -
3.
or in Ted Hughes bitter cosmology, 1-,here such blackness is due to Crow's negation.
A third school of theorists interpreted myth instead as moral didacticism.
Perhaps 'the Greek gods are rakes, and unnatural rakes,20, but all can be thus'l
interpreted as mere allegory. 'rThatsoever things .. rere 'h'1.'i tten aforetime 'Here
written for our learning,2I, an approach which dismantles the paradox of a
(supposedly) Christian culture deriving so many of its educational models from an
(undoubtedly) pagan literature. Mythology, thus cleanse~ could become a 'non
l22
discursive form of ethical teaching • This impulse lay behind those mythological
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handbooks, most notably Eoccaccio' s Gem,eol"oaia neoru.m , which became the stock in
trade for any serious Renaissance poet, a kind of moral esperanto. 'Eoccace's
Demogorgon', invented by the Italian but passed off as a classical deity, is
, 1"1.-.; r.
rB!er:..'ed to as ~ by Jonson - as already seen' - and by Spenser, NarlorTe, Dryden,
Milton and even Shelley24. Such allegorical interpretation could easily become
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absUrd~5 or' self-defeating • The whole theory was later turned on its head vThern
27
Eultmanm attempted to de-mythologize the New Testament , seeing myth as obscuring,
rather than expressing, an ethical code. Similaxly, the major employment of this
device by post-war poets has again been essentially negative. Seamus Heaney has
used Northern legend to stress intolerance: and pointless sacrifice; 'l'ed Hughes ha.s
created an alternative to the biblical account of creation, 1-rith in which, God;
~,
is impotent, the universe la horror beyo~d redemptionl28 and morals nonsensical.
The 19th century added two further theories to his maelstrom: myth as philology
and myth as ritual. F.Max Muller's description of myth as 'a disease of laYlguage'
has, nevertheless, a long and distinguished history29, the gods being regarded as
'nothing but poetical names which are allow"ed to assume a
gradua~ly
divine personality never contemplated by . or i' I' t ors ,30 •
the~r g~na ~nven
Myth is therefore an adjunc~ of poetry - rat~er tharr vice versa - Cassirer's idea
of myth as itself a kind of langufLol'"O, a 'symbolic form,3I through which we can
a.pprehend external reality. Ruthven has drawn an interesting parallel here ITi th
the French symbolist poets. For Mallarme language becomes in effect a form of :
32
myth transcending verbal co~~unication, the senses beguilingly confused.
'Le pur soleil qui remise
Trop dl~clat pour l'y trier
,\O. te e/ bloui sa chemise
l33
'Sur Ie dos uu vitrier •
Here, syntax 'appeals to nothing but itself, to nothing outside the world of the
Poem' 34, J.0 ts OvTn m~v- ,ytholorbJJ'tr . Co n v ers e yI, cetr < lJ° .n sch 0 1 ars sarr myth not as a ritual
ordering of "lords but as a verbalisation of ritual, 'in almost every case the myth
was derived from the ritual, and not the ritual from the myth,35. This forms the
mastering impulse behind J~G.Frazer's monumental work of anthropology The Golden
13ough. The priest of Nemi, the Sacred ,-[ood, is traced through a bewildering maze
of primitive fertility rites, to his mythic origins as Jupiter (his spouse is Diana;
'The Goddess whom he served and married ••• no other than the Queen of
Heaven, the true wife of the Sky_god,36.
The 'Cambridge School' applied these new' insights specifically to classical myth.
This developed, und0r the influence of Roger Fry, to the idea of myth as a symptom
of spiritual illlease - 'mythology •• , springs like ritual from arrested, unsatisfied
desire' 37. If these theories, perhaps understandably, inspired little poetry-
least of all in the verse translations of Greek drama by Gilbert Murray, another·
Cambridge ritualist 38 - Jessie L. I'feston' s arcane burroviings certainly did. Her -
work develope~out of ~~ser's source material in an exactly contrar~ direction
39
to Fry's. FnomRitualto R66ance postulated the Grail legends as folk memories
of a lost fertility religion of ancient Europe, the king ritually slain each Spring
to bring rebirth,._renelial. This fired, almost immediately, The l:aste Land and a
whole revival of the quest tradition, from Auden to Geoffrey Hill, its imaeery as
40
potent as it now seems historioally dubious • R:ltual is seen not as a disease -
as it vTas for Fry - but a healing force, 'stirring/dull roots with spring ram,4I.
_ The present century has developed ti'TO further tools with which to' dissect myt~
killing as they probe, structuralism and psycho-analysis. Freud related myth both
to dream and to the unconscious mind (three of the prime sources of poetr~).
'A large part of the mythological view of the world ••• is nothing
but psychology projected into the physical world,42.
As for Fry or Jane Harrison, myths are evidence of psychic, or sexual, imbala~ce.
Theseus's adventures in the labyrinth, by such a reckoning, are 'a representation
of anal birth: the trTisting paths are the bowels and Ariadne's thread is the
umbilical cord' 43 • It is no surprise that such heaV""J Ii terp~lism-, straightfor~:aI'd
as a jigsaw puzzle, has influenced not lite~~y c~eation but'literary criticism.
FJ.'his is seen at its finest in Ernest Jones' teasing out of the Oedipus theme jn