Keats' Apollo:
Myth in English Romantic Poetry
The Turn to Myth in English Romantic Poetry
According to Douglas Bush, the Neoclassical leanings of the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries tended not to encourage mythopoetic writing,
but rather to disparage its literary merits and irrationality. The poet
Cowley, for instance, denounced myth as the "confused antiquated Dreams
of senseless Fables and Metamorphoses" (Pagan Myth and Christian Tradition
in English Poetry 32). Creative mythopoeia "gave way largely to sophisticated
historical inquiries into the origins and real nature of myth, the psychology
of primitive societies, and comparative religion," or, in literary works,
either to pallid allusions or to the parody or burlesque of ancient epic
and myth in Augustan satirical poetry (32-3). The return to myth in poetry
was, according to Bush, affected in part by the growing non-literary interest
in archeology, folklore and ballads, and comparative mythological and religious
studies (35-7). However, "the main initial agent in the revitalizing of
Greek myth was the Romantic religion of nature," meaning loosely, their
"reaction against the mechanistic view of the world and man" (37) and responsive
"concept of dynamic wholeness" and organic unity (34). The extent to which
and manner in which this response meant a return to myth varied. Byron,
for instance, retained a more typically eighteenth century satirical mode
(Mythology and the Romantic Tradition 71-2), whereas Blake created a highly
original syncretistic and eclectic mythological universe of his own (40;
Pagan Myth 36). Coleridge and Wordsworth tended to have more reservations
about directly or explicitly incorporating traditional mythology in their
poetry because of its pagan content and its hackneyed use in the previous
century, whereas Keats and Shelley much more readily "re-created" traditional
myths "with a new, sometimes half-private, elaboration of symbolic meaning"
(Pagan Myth 40). The personalized recreation of myth could lead to a sort
of nostalgia and decadent aestheticism or emotionalism, as goes the old
criticism of Romantic poetry, but it could also translate "that idea or
vision into more or less impersonal and universal terms" that carried public
import (46). This turn to myth in English Romantic poetry suggests that
Romanticism has a special relationship
to mythology. Literary myth-criticism is particularly well-equipped to
analyze this relationship and to draw out its implications in Romantic
poetry.
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created 5/7/98