theoryofliteratu00inwell

Image, Metafhor, Symbol, Myth 197
tian "mythology." But other writers think of modern man as
having shallow, inadequate, or perhaps even "false" myths, such
as the myth of "progress," or of "equality," or of universal edu-
cation, or of the hygienic and modish well-being to which the
advertisements invite. The common denominator between the
two conceptions seems to be the judgment (true, probably) that
when old, long- felt, self-coherent ways of life (rituals with their
accompanying myths) are disrupted by "modernism," most men
(or all) are impoverished: as men can't live by abstractions alone,
they have to fill their voids by crude, extemporized, fragmentary
myths (pictures of what might be or ought to be). To speak of the
need for myth, in the case of the imaginative writer, is a sign of
his felt need for communion with his society, for a recognized
status as artist functioning within society. The French Sym-
bolists existed in self-recognized isolation, were hermetic spe-
cialists, who believed the poet must choose between commercial
prostitution of his art and aesthetic purity and coldness. But
Yeats, for all his veneration of Mallarme, felt the need of a
union with Ireland 5 so he compounded traditional Celtic mythology
with his own mythicizing version of latter-day Ireland, in
which the Augustan Anglo-Irish (Swift, Berkeley, and Burke)
are as freely interpreted as the American heroes of Vachel Lindsay's
imagination. 21
For many writers, myth is the common denominator between
poetry and religion. There exists a modern view, of course (rep-
resented by Matthew Arnold and the early I. A. Richards), that
poetry will more and more take the place of the supernatural
religion in which modern intellectuals can no longer believe. But
a more impressive case can probably be made for the view that
poetry cannot for long take the place of religion since it can
scarcely long survive it. Religion is the greater mystery; poetry,
the lesser. Religious myth is the large-scale authorization of
poetic metaphor. Thus Philip Wheelwright, protesting that by
positivists "religious truth and poetic truth are dismissed as fictions,"
asserts that the "needed perspective is ... a mytho-
religious one." An older English representative of this view is
John Dennis ; a relatively recent one is Arthur Machen. 22
The whole series (image, metaphor, symbol, myth) we may
charge older literary study with treating externally and super-