Why Myth Mattered to the Modernists
In the wake of World War I, many writers found the inherited literary forms of the 19th century inadequate. The modern world was broken, and poetry needed a new architecture to reflect the fragmentation of meaning. For T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, myth offered not escape, but structure — a scaffolding onto which they could project the anxieties, losses, and contradictions of modern life.
T.S. Eliot famously referred to this approach as the "mythic method" — not an act of revivalism, but a deliberate superimposition of ancient stories onto the modern psyche. Myth became a way of making sense of spiritual decay, industrial collapse, and cultural dislocation. It was not ornamental; it was essential.
T.S. Eliot and the Grail Myth
T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) is perhaps the most famous example of mythological modernism. Drawing heavily on Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Eliot overlays the legend of the Fisher King and the Grail quest onto the spiritual desolation of postwar Europe.
The barren landscape, the sterile relationships, and the disjointed voices mirror the wounded Fisher King — a figure from Arthurian myth whose land suffers until the hero heals him. Eliot writes:
“Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road.”
This desert becomes both literal and symbolic, a landscape drained of meaning, where myth flickers like an echo.
The poem closes with a Sanskrit invocation from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad:
“Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih.”
Translated roughly as "Give. Sympathize. Control," these words gesture toward a spiritual redemption that transcends the West, linking ancient Eastern philosophy to the modern crisis of the soul.
Ezra Pound and the Classical Inheritance
While Eliot built a mythic framework from literary fragments, Ezra Pound sought to be the mythmaker. His life's work, The Cantos, is a sprawling, often opaque epic that weaves together Greek mythology, Confucian ethics, medieval theology, and Renaissance humanism.
Canto I begins with a translation-adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, filtered through the Latin of Andreas Divus. The speaker descends into the underworld, invoking Odysseus's journey:
“And then went down to the ship, / set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea…”
Pound’s voice becomes the bard’s voice, echoing across centuries. The journey motif recurs throughout The Cantos, not only as literal travel but as cultural transmission — a way of ferrying lost wisdom into modernity.
His references to Dionysus, Aphrodite, Persephone, and Hermes often appear not as characters but as forces — symbols of transformation, decay, or renewal. But Pound doesn't stop at Greece and Rome. He incorporates Confucian ideals, Provencal troubadour poetry, and American figures like Jefferson and Adams, creating a mythic cosmology of his own making.
The Mythic Method
In his 1923 essay on James Joyce, Eliot coined the term “mythic method,” praising Joyce’s use of the Odyssey in Ulysses. He wrote:
“Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. […] It is a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”
This method became a hallmark of modernist literature: rather than depicting events realistically, writers embedded them in ancient symbolic frameworks, drawing out universal themes of death, rebirth, and transformation.
Why Myth? Why Then?
The First World War shattered faith in progress, reason, and humanism. Myth offered a vocabulary for loss that realism could not. These were not comforting stories — they were brutal, uncanny, and sometimes obscure. But in their strangeness, they spoke to a truth deeper than fact.
For Pound, who once declared “Make it new,” myth was not a return to the past but a way to renew the present. For Eliot, whose poems often lamented spiritual emptiness, myth provided a grammar for lament and perhaps redemption.
Critique and Complexity
Both Eliot and Pound have come under critique for their elitism, Eurocentrism, and — especially in Pound’s case — for espousing fascist ideology. His admiration for Mussolini and anti-Semitic broadcasts during WWII have marred his legacy. Eliot, too, was not immune to charges of cultural conservatism and religious dogmatism.
Yet their mythic approach laid groundwork for countless later writers. Caribbean poet Derek Walcott reimagined Homer in Omeros. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) rewrote the Helen myth through a feminist lens in Helen in Egypt. These writers didn’t just borrow myth — they reclaimed it, complicated it, made it speak in new registers.
Legacy in American Letters
Eliot and Pound’s influence in America was profound. Though Eliot became a British citizen, his early poems and essays were foundational for American modernism. Pound, born in Idaho, mentored countless writers — from H.D. to Hemingway — and helped define what modernist poetry looked like on both sides of the Atlantic.
Their legacy is not only stylistic but philosophical. They gave myth back to poetry, not as a museum piece but as a living organism — capable of mutating, adapting, haunting.
Suggested Reading
- The Waste Land – T.S. Eliot (especially with Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance)
- The Cantos – Ezra Pound (start with Canto I and selections from the Pisan Cantos)
- Helen in Egypt – H.D. (a mythic feminist response to Pound and Eliot)
- Omeros – Derek Walcott (a postcolonial reworking of Homeric myth)
Final Thoughts
The use of myth by Pound and Eliot was not an act of nostalgia — it was a radical reimagining. By braiding the ancient into the modern, they created poetry that could hold fracture and wholeness at once. Their myths were not distant legends, but intimate mechanisms of understanding a world that no longer made sense.
In doing so, they reminded us that myth is not past — it is pattern. And in times of crisis, pattern is what keeps poetry breathing.
