Keats' Apollo:
Myth in English Romantic Poetry
Myth-Critics on English Romanticism
How was mythology approached by the literary movement called Romanticism?
Is there a distinctly Romantic attitude towards classical mythology? Similarities
are sometimes found because they are expected, yet there may be, as myth-critics
have argued, a general attitude towards myth that we may call "Romantic,"
however much it may vary among the poets. Douglas Bush accounts for "the
revitalizing of Greek myth" as a general "reaction against the mechanistic
view of world and man" (Pagan Myth and Christian Tradition in English Poetry
37). What Bush never explicitly says but seems to suggest is that mythology,
representative of its supposedly primitive ancient source, could hearken
back to a state in which society was organically interrelated, man was
connected to nature and unselfconscious, and the imagination was powerful
and unfettered. Therefore Romantic use of myth could be critical of the
present situation, nostalgic and mournful for an irretrievable innocence,
or forward-looking, expectant and prophetic of a future state of wholeness.
Warren Stevenson defends a similar thesis, though much more explicitly,
in The Myth of the Golden Age in English Romantic Poetry. He suggests that
"a fidelity to the Edenic archetype together with a nascent stylistic nonconformity
might constitute the essence of Romanticism" (108). The "central thematic
importance of the myth of the Golden Age" (4) is repeatedly manifested
in such motifs as childhood innocence, in the Fall as a constriction of
imaginative powers, a unification of the divine, human, and natural, and
the poet's suffering as a memory of paradise. Accordingly, their uses of
traditional mythology tend to pick up on these themes, either representing
the original state, or retelling the Fall and prophesying a return. Each
poet, says Stevenson, "seems to have...discovered for himself the psychic
and cultural resonance of the myth," a universal, timeless myth (4). Despite
Stevenson's debt to Northrop Frye, Frye himself views the Romantic movement
as "fully comprehensible" (A Study of English Romanticism 5) only when
seen as "a new mythological construction" of the world affecting both literary
and cognitive structures (emphasis mine 46). This "mythology" is neither
universal nor a simple retelling of the ancient Greek and Roman stories,
but when classical mythological traditions enter Romantic literature, they
are reshaped to conform to its novel mythological structure. Romantic mythology--in
contrast to the pre-Romantic hierarchical mythology of a vertically related
heaven and hell and cyclically related pre and post-lapsarian worlds (46)--is
concerned with withins and withouts, with alienation and communion, and
with depth rather than height--an anarchistic de-hierarchizing myth (47-8).
It is an "open" mythology aware of the imaginative, human source of thought,
and therefore open to the ancient mythological traditions as pliable expressions
of the human imagination (16), as signs of a nascent anarchic human creativity
present in the ancient world. Anthony John Harding's argument in The Reception
of Myth in English Romantic Poetry in some way opposes all of the above
assessments of Romantic attitude towards myth. The Romantic reaction against
"the scepticism of the Enlightenment" should not be seen in terms of "a
reversion to credulity, and a simple nostalgia for an irretrievable past"
(an exaggeration of the postition), but in terms of taking Enlightenment
"rationalist analysis to a higher synthesis, ...recognizing the sheer difficulty
of understanding ancient civilizations, their distance from us" (15). Rather
than assuming that the Romantics themselves associated myth with a primitive,
"authentic" or ideal world (10), Harding argues that the Romantics problematize
their relation to ancient myth, which was seen "not, primarily, as an awesome,
unapproachable, lifeless 'tradition,'" nor as an untroubled golden age,
"but as an alien yet seductive sublime, all the more fascinating for its
familiarity" (12). Romantic reception of myth is filled with tensions between
familiarity and distance and between what a myth will and will not tell
us. These generalizations about the Romantic movement's attitude to classical
mythology are faced with the same difficulties as defining Romanticism
in the first place--something always seems to exceed or escape the general
rule. Despite these reservations, myth-critics accept as a general rule
that the Romantics were attracted to classical mythology as something past
that may or may not be understood, that may or may not be recovered, and
yet may live again somehow in their poetry.
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created 5/7/98