16 - Modernist Mythopoeia

Summary

THIS CHAPTER ARGUES that modernist mythopoeia was a distinctive aesthetic for expressing ideas of the sacred that fall between the polarities of secular materialism and dogmatic religion. Even though modernist mythopoeia allows for a varied range of spiritual perspectives, this chapter primarily focuses on D. H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers! (1923) and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), because, whereas the former exemplifies a mythopoeic aesthetic, the latter is a significant counterpoint to the modernist tendency to read religion as, or through, myth. Modernist mythopoeia is a period-specific aesthetic, the legacies of which, in terms of the so-called secular-religious divide, are nonetheless reflected in post-secular and post-liberal debates.

The long-standing debate on what constitutes modernism has gravitated between notions of historical period and form. As Michael Levenson states: ‘So much of the artistic passion of the period was stirred by questions of technique.’ And for Rebecca Beasley: ‘One of the defining features of literary modernism is the tension it preserves between tradition and originality.’ Whilst moved by Ezra Pound’s rallying cry of ‘make it new’ to break with the past, modernists were devoted ‘genealogists’, unearthing the past. In this respect, the use of myth as a modernist poetic – mythopoeia – was a ‘new’ technique for recovering creative ways of engaging with ideas of the sacred. Michael Bell considers modernist literature as ‘often concerned with the question of how to live within a new context of thought, or a new worldview’. And so, Friedrich Holderlin’s line, ‘poetically man dwells upon the earth’, is an apt reference point for understanding modernist mythopoeia as a reimagining of Being in the world. For mythopoeia, as a modernist response to how myth and religion intersect in multiple ways, was also a means for overcoming a traditional religious language of symbols, convictions and practices and allowing for new spiritual worldviews.

Michael Bell’s Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (1997) was the first serious scholarly book dedicated to an understanding of ‘mythopoeia’ as an ‘underlying metaphysic of much modernist literature’.