Keats' Apollo:
Myth in English Romantic Poetry
History and Archetype: Issues in Myth-Criticism
Douglas Bush's Mythology In English Romantic Poetry is the only attempt
at a comprehensive survey of the topic, however, as Harding quipps, it
is more "taxonomic than critical" (The Reception of Myth 13). Bush provides
important background material: the attitudes of the poets and their contemporaries
to ancient civilization and mythology, their relation to contemporary issues,
the materials available to the poets, and a survey of the major poets'
significant mythopoetic works.
For that reason, even though Bush has not been critically influential,
his book remains an invaluable resource. A far more influential scholar
in the field of literary criticism has been Northrop Frye. In A Study of
English Romanticism Frye claims that the "informing structures of literature,"
and apparently of all fields of intellectual inquiry, "are myths, that
is, fictions and metaphors that identify aspects of human personality with
the natural environment" (4-5). Myth is, in Frye's estimation, a human,
imaginative structure which, by metaphorically identifying aspects of ourselves
with aspects of our social and physical world, helps us to order and thereby
interpret that world. Because of this, our literary conventions and modes
of thinking are always "enclosed within a total mythological structure,
which may not be explicitly known to anyone, but is nevertheless present
as a shaping principle" (5). This "mythological structure," or, though
Frye does not explicitly use the term here, this archetypal
structure changes with the times, but it also shapes the times. For Frye,
then, myth-criticism not only illuminates literature, but can uncover parts
of the total mythological structure that gives identity and coherence to
a historical period's thought and art. Archetypal criticism of this sort,
although it does not always defend its premises, can be very compelling
because its implications are so vast. While not all myth-critics work from
the same model as Frye, some certainly do (for example, see Stevenson,
The Myth of the Golden Age in English Romantic Poetry), and, indeed, it
would not be unfair to say that most myth-critics make use of Frye-inspired
archetypal thinking in some way. Stephen C. Behrendt's introductory essay
to the collection History and Myth: Essays on English Romantic Literature,
for instance, explicitly presents its working definition of mythopoeia
as a functionally universalizing gesture (making a concrete historical
situation universal and timeless) as a post-structuralist reworking of
Frye's structuralist myth-theory (19-20). Myth is a pattern interpreting
and universalizing particulars of history; history infuses myth with relevant
meanings and keeps it alive (20). Anthony John Harding's The Reception
of Myth in English Romantic Poetry, influenced by Hans Blumberg's Work
On Myth, emphasizes the "reception" or reworking aspect of mythopoeia
and very skillfully explores the blindspots of archetypal thinking to this
reworking: "What tends to be underestimated in this approach is the 'work'
done on the myth--the strategies, questionings, ironies, and framing devices
with which the author has transmuted and modified" the myth (8). Likewise,
what tends to be forgotten are the historically changing conceptions of
and attitudes towards the "mythic" (11). Harding does not explicitly offer
an alternative to archetypal criticism. What underlies his praxis is the
assumption that since no stable archetype or myth really exists except
in its particular and historical manifestations, the particularity is most
important. But he still recognizes a fluid body of a myth's manifestations,
as known or understood by the writer, in relation to which he posits and
adds his own particular manifestation of the 'type.' He seems to suggest
that in place of 'archetypal myth-criticism,' we could drop the 'arche,'
the over-rulingness, and have a 'typal myth-criticism' which emphasizes
the reception aspect of a shifting and mutable myth-tradition. Harding's
emphasis on the "work" done by the artist is extremely important. Literary
criticism ought always to be sensitive to the hand of the artist, especially
as it gestures to myth, to history, to the world outside the text.
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created 5/7/98