1963
From The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry, ed. Stephen Spender and Donald Hall, 2nd ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1970), 187–90. First appeared in the first edition of the encyclopedia (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1963), 225–8; the reprint corrects two minor typographical errors.
A myth, in its simplest meaning, is a story about a god, or some being comparable to a god. Hence myths usually grow up in close association with religions, but, because they are stories, they also belong to literature, especially to narrative, fictional, and dramatic literature with internal characters. It makes no difference to its relation to literature whether a myth is believed to be true or false. Classical mythology became purely literary after the religions associated with it died, but from a literary point of view we may speak of Christian or Hindu mythology even when the attitude towards it is also one of religious acceptance.
Most of the stories we call myths are ancient and arose in the period of oral tradition along with folk tales. Primitive cultures generally have in their oral tradition a special group of canonical tales which are regarded as particularly serious or important, as having “really happened,” or as being of special significance in explaining certain features of the society, such as a ritual of the origin of a tribe or class; these are myths. In structure, however, there is little to distinguish a myth from a folk tale. Such Classical legends as the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass have many analogues in folk tale, and so have the Hebrew legends of the creation, the fall, and the flood. The difference is that myths, because of their central and canonical importance, tend to stick together and form mythologies, whereas folk tales simply disseminate and interchange motifs. It is not any structural feature in the stories of Phaethon or Endymion that makes them myths, for we could—and do—have folk tales of the same kind: it is their attachment to a growing body of stories told about a sun-god and a moon-goddess, and the further attachment of these deities to Apollo and Artemis in the Olympian hierarchy, that makes them myths.
The true myth, then, is an episode in a mythology, and a developed mythology tends to become encyclopedic, that is, to provide a complete set of stories dealing with a society’s religious observances, its origin, and its earlier history. A mythology, we may say, undertakes to tell the definitive story of how a given culture or society came to be what it is. Besides this, it supplies a number of episodic tales illustrating the relations of gods with one another or with man, usually with a cautionary moral. It identifies or interrelates the various gods of local cults; it sanctions the law by giving it a divine origin; it provides a divine ancestry for its kings and heroes. At a certain stage of development a mythology produces a theogony, a connected narrative beginning with the origin of the gods and of the departments of nature they personify, such as heaven and earth, the creation and original state of mankind, the inauguration of law and culture, and so on down to the writer’s own time. Some theogonies carry on the story to the end of time and the future annihilation of the world. The theogonic narrative structure, as well as all the subordinate functions of myth just listed, occur both in sacred books, such as the Christian Bible, which have a major literary influence, and in literature itself, as in Hesiod, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the theogony a mythology has expanded into a story with larger religious and philosophical outlines, where we are reading about the origin, situation, and destiny of mankind as a whole.
As a society develops, its myths naturally become revised, selected, expurgated, or reinterpreted to suit its changing religious needs. An immense amount of editorial labour lies between the myths of the Old Testament and the same myths in their modern form. The more archaic stories are often felt to be in bad theological taste: as Plutarch says, gods represented as doing unworthy things are no gods [Moralia, 417e–f]. In this way is developed a tradition of explaining or accounting for myths. Myths may be interpreted as allegories illustrating moral truths. Hence the device known in Greek culture as hyponoia, the attempt, say, to save the faces of both Homer and Aphrodite by explaining the story of Hephaestus’s net in the Odyssey as an allegory of something profound and morally respectable.1 Or mythology as a whole may be interpreted allegorically, as primitive science, as esoteric philosophy, as distorted history, or (since the rise of Freudian psychology) as sexually directed dream. The interpretation of myth, chiefly as moral allegory, was one of the cultural heavy industries of Western Europe between Plutarch and the late Renaissance, and it played a very important role in literature, as Renaissance poets were accustomed to make great use of such allegorical handbooks as Natalis Comes’ Mythologia or Sandys’ translation of Ovid. Similar handbooks were used by Blake, Shelley, Keats, and Goethe in the Romantic period, and they were still being written as late as Ruskin’s Queen of the Air.
For poets, however, myth remains primarily a story: its meaning is implicit in the story itself, and the poet’s impulse is to retell the story, or invent a new one with the same characters. Plato, for example, ridicules hyponoia [Republic, 378d], but he uses his own myths, usually with the familiar names of Zeus and Prometheus. Whether a poet is interested simply in the story or in giving a particular meaning to the story will depend, of course, on his temperament and circumstances. But there are at least three reasons why myth has a distinctive connection with poetry.
In the first place, a fully developed mythology, especially one that has produced a definitive theogony or sacred book, provides the outlines of a total verbal communication. There is nothing about the duties, destiny, meaning, or context of human life, nothing at least which can be expressed in words, that is not explained or provided for in the accepted myth. This is the normal attitude of an orthodox Christian or Mohammedan to the Bible or the Koran, and it is the usual attitude of all religions to their sacred books. The poet can seldom claim such authority, but if he is a poet of great imaginative scope, inclined to think deeply on the largest possible issues of life, and attracted to the genres of greatest range, such as the epic, he is likely to make his major poem a recreation of a myth. Milton’s Paradise Lost deals primarily with the Biblical myths of the creation and the fall, but of course the whole structure of Biblical mythology, from the beginning to the end of time, is recreated in it. In Dante it is the sacramental system of the church rather than the narrative of the Bible that is primarily recreated, but the same encyclopedic reconstruction of a traditional mythology has taken place. And whenever a poet chooses a theme of particular significance in expressing his conception of life as a whole, it is likely to be a traditional mythical theme. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Byron’s Cain, Victor Hugo’s Fin de Satan, are random examples. Classical mythology is particularly useful to Western poets whenever doctrinal reasons prevent them from using the Bible: thus if Ariosto wishes to provide a mythical ancestry for his patrons, he will turn to Virgil and the Trojan War.
In the second place, myths are about gods, and gods are usually associated with some (or, as with Christ, all) aspects of the physical world. The association is usually one of identity, expressed by metaphor: thus we speak of Apollo, in pure metaphor, as a “sun-god.” Hence myth enables a poet to make an unusually full use of metaphor, of natural imagery, of an imaginative identification of human emotion and nature. If Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis had been about more realistically conceived characters, like Romeo and Juliet, there might have been certain advantages, but the young poet would not have had nearly so much fun playing with his imagery and working out such associations as the “solemn sympathy” between the crimson flower and the death of Adonis.2 And even when the explicit connection with myth is dropped, the metaphorical concentration of myth is likely to remain. Thus the language of myth tends to become the language of poetry. Keats’s Ode to Psyche is explicitly addressed to a goddess; the odes to autumn and the nightingale are not; but Autumn with her hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind is no less a goddess, and the nightingale no less a light-winged Dryad of the trees, even if not directly associated with what Cowper calls Philomela’s “mechanic woe.”3
Finally, myths are stories about characters who, almost by definition, can do what they like—which means in practice what the storyteller likes. Hence myths are abstract literary patterns, stories told without adjustment to demands for realism, plausibility, logical motivation, or the conditions of limited power. Later on, in literature, these demands are met, but they are met only by “displacement,” that is, by adaptation of the mythical pattern to a realistic setting. Thus the plots of Tom Jones and Oliver Twist are realistic adaptations of stories of the mysterious birth of a hero that can be traced through New Comedy and Euripides to such myths as those of Perseus and Moses. New plots are not invented; the old plots are adapted, not because they are old, but because there is a very limited number of effective ways in which a story may be told, and the mythology which does not provide examples of the entire number is rare indeed. An author’s awareness of the traditional affinities of his plot matters little. We know from the critical gossip surrounding T.S. Eliot’s The Confidential Clerk that its author was aware of its resemblance to Euripides’ Ion, and of the mythical patterns behind that play;4 we have no reason to suppose Oscar Wilde or W.S. Gilbert equally aware of similar resemblances in The Importance of Being Earnest or The Gondoliers. The resemblances are based on the structural principles of comedy, not on the author’s erudition.
The conclusion from all this is that a fully developed literature, as a whole, is what a fully developed mythology is in earlier ages: a total structure of imaginative verbal communication. It fills up its space more completely: a myth may recall an entire mythology to one familiar with it, but most literary works, unlike the Divina Commedia or Paradise Lost, give little indication, except of a very indirect and oblique kind, of the whole range of literary experience. Again, literary criticism does not have a word, or a conception, for literature as a whole which would have the same relation to individual works of literature that “mythology” has to individual myths. If it had, the true relation of myth to poetry would be self-evident.