theoryofliteratu00inwell

Image y Metafhor } Symbol, Myth 1 95
to "die" j and, if one couples by contrast the "woods are lovely,
dark, and deep" (all three adjectives panegyric) with the moral
and social check of "promises to keep," one can't wholly reject
the passing, not insisted on, equation of aesthetic contemplation
with some kind of ceasing to be as a responsible person. Presumably
no constant reader of poetry will go wrong with Frost ;
but, partly because of his natural symbolism, Frost has drawn a
wide audience, some of whom, once grasping the possibility of
symbols, will bear down too heavily on both the natural symbols
and their companions, giving to his plurisigns a fixity and rigidity
alien to the nature of poetic statement, especially contemporary
poetic statement. 14
The fourth of our terms is "myth," which appears in Aris-
totle's Poetics as the word for plot, narrative structure, "fable."
Its antonym and counterpoint is logos. The "myth" is narrative,
story, as against dialectical discourse, exposition ; it is also the ir-
rational or intuitive as against the systematically philosophical:
it is the tragedy of Aeschylus against the dialectic of Socrates. 15
"Myth," a favorite term of modern criticism, points to, hovers
over, an important area of meaning, shared by religion, folklore,
anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, and the fine arts. In
some of its habitual oppositions, it is contraposed to "history," or
to "science," or to "philosophy," or to "allegory" or to "truth." 16
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Age of the
Enlightenment, the term had commonly a pejorative connota-
tion: a myth was a fiction—scientifically or historically untrue.
But already in the Scienza Nuova of Vico, the emphasis has
shifted to what, since the German Romanticists, Coleridge,
Emerson, and Nietzsche, has become gradually dominant—the
conception of "myth" as, like poetry, a kind of truth or equiv-
alent of truth, not a competitor to historic or scientific truth but
a supplement. 17
Historically, myth follows and is correlative to ritual; it is
"the spoken part of ritual; the story which the ritual enacts."
The ritual is performed for a society by its priestly representa-
tive in order to avert or procure ; it is an "agendum" which is re-
currently, permanently necessary, like harvests and human fer-
tility, like the initiation of the young into their society's culture
and a proper provision for the future of the dead. But in a