I went to a talk recently co-hosted by former poet laureate Andrew Motion. During the Q&A he was asked whether Ancient Greek and Roman mythology had a place in contemporary writing. He cited the production at the National Theatre of Ted Hughes’ version of Racine’s Phedre as proof that it was still relevant. But he then went on to say that in his own teaching of poetry he found his students often lacked knowledge of the stories and characters of mythology which he said was a shame, not least because he had to explain background so often.
I pick up this point because if Motion has to explain mythological references to his students, understandably some will ask why poets continue to use them.
I suggest that for modern writers classical mythology offers a shorthand that can be called upon when personal or direct language presents difficulties, freeing the poet to explore ideas. The characters and events of mythology are about the eternally important issues of what it is to be human: love and anger, war and the reasons for war or lack of them, identity and loss, complexities of family relationships, justice versus the rule of law, what heroism means, hope, despair – these are some examples from a long list. The ancient stories are deceptively simple, giving today’s writers the option to interpret events, characters and themes every which way: symbolism and metaphor being two of the more obvious routes that spring to mind. Or a mythological reference can add a layer of meaning bringing interest or a cause for thought.
As a reader, poems that use classical mythology can sometimes be off-putting. Sadly some poets do petrify ancient myth into formal inaccessible puzzles, and think that a mythological subject matter requires old fashioned language. But a good poem should be understandable on more than one level, and new forms work with familiar themes. If it is a well-written contemporary poem a lack of knowledge of the specific myth should not stop appreciation or enjoyment. However, a reader who is prepared to do the work and find out what the poet means by his or her references, will gain further insight.
What Do You Think?
Do you think classical mythologies have a place in contemporary poetry?
Yes absolutely! I know there was a blip when kids weren’t taught much classical literature at all, but most of them picked it up afterwards – it’s such a continuous source of allusions. The Bible is the same.
Graphic novels and manga films use classical references alongside the Japanese ones, and there’s a whole generation of young people prepared to learn the background and work with them to produce new work. If poetry isn’t going to make an equivalent effort, I think we might as well shut up shop now.
I believe that we will make a very grave mistake – and be much the poorer for it – if we do not support and encourage young people to read, consider and enjoy the myths, stories and histories of earlier cultures. A few years ago, I was teaching A level English Literature in a comprehensive school of good reputation. However, only a small minority of my students had a competent understanding of English History. Does this mean that poets should avoid historical references because they are no longer relevant? Also, I would argue that we need to preserve our knowledge and understanding of Greek and Roman mythology because the myths continue to be psychologically and emotionally true. Anyone who has read Jung, Hillman or Thomas Moore cannot be in doubt of this.
Classical mythology will always have a place in contemporary poetry, I reckon. It’s a set of stories, and humans will always use stories to make sense of the world, whether it’s Ovid or Grimm or EastEnders.
Of course, a story’s no good if it hasn’t been told, which is roughly the equivalent of finding a reference opaque because you don’t know the story. That’s to say, the story, at that point hasn’t been told, in that sense, to you.
But isn’t that just an argument for making the poem that cites Homer, for example, so compelling that the neophyte reader will be inspired to seek out the original myth? Or for writing in such a way that, in the course of reading the poem, the reader comes to understand the original story anyway without recourse to Wikipedia.
An example. I read and thoroughly enjoyed Robin Robertson’s The Death of Actaeon (from Swithering). Now, I could recount plots from The Magic Roundabout or Friends with greater ease than Actaeon’s ill-fated glance at the naked Artemis. No, that’s not quite true; I’d have had no clue about Actaeon, other than remembering the Titian painting. But I wouldn’t have been able to say anything about the story.
Greek myths drop out of my head like alfalfa seeds from a colander. How many times have I looked up Demeter, Persephone, Orpheus and Euridice? Many. So yes, I won’t get the full resonance of a poetic reference, but I am excited enough to try, mostly.
That’s probably because, as with Actaeon, or Titian’s dying Marsyus, the emotion of the stories is so forceful, the human situations so extreme, that we are always likely to find these narratives compelling, even if I’m more familiar with the wooing of Daphne by Niles, the eternal courtship of Ross and Rachel or the iridescent radio-soap evils of Brian Aldridge.
These latter tales are unlikely to have quite the same outreach, however. I wouldn’t put money on their being around in 2000 years’ time. Too bound in their time, too inflected with textures that will fray. Not mythical enough, really.
At Totleigh Barton last year, Arvon’s Devon Arcadia (now what exactly was Arcadia?), I listened to Vicki Feaver, the week’s visiting poet, confidently reference several Greek myths during her reading. I asked her afterwards where that familiarity had come from, expecting that she would say she’d just had a solid classical education. To my surprise, she told me she’d just grown up with a cut-down, illustrated children’s book of Greek myths and that was how she’d come to love them, and to breathe them as part of her internalised narrative stock, her world of metaphors. I’m on the look-out for that book.
So, nothing difficult in how she came by her enviable internal stock of myths, and the example could as easily have been tales from the Bible or Grimm.
Some ostensibly “shared” narrative will always be opaque to someone, somewhere, almost certainly me, as the metaphorical alfalfa of mythical particularity tumbles from the cognitive colander of my memory.
But I hope that poets go on having the confidence to build their intricate castles of words, pictures and feelings around any story that inspires and fires them, whether that is as “published” as the coming of the magi or some private plot.
To many reworkings there will be shrugs, and biblical narrative, the lingua franca of a Fifties child like me, is pretty much Greek now to most people under the age of 35. But the psychological intensities of the best stories will last as long as there are books and people to retell them.
A couple of lines from Larkin’s Church Going come to mind — and in a way that poem, about visiting churches in a post-religious age/sensibility is like a grand metaphor for the whole question of finding oneself inside something that has fallen out of use, like a discarded narrative.
One gobbet, which I quote slightly laterally in the frame of my own endless capacity to forget the gist of myths I look up, is this:
“From where I stand, the roof looks almost new –
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don’t”
The other is this:
“someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious”
Let’s go on surprising ourselves with the hunger to find out about the narratives that someone, somewhere has been moved by and cherished — enough to write poetry.
Yes Absolutely! How can anyone go through life without reading Aristophanes, for example? When the lizard you-knows on Socrates’ head in The Clouds, I was in stitches… I always discuss classical literature in my lectures, and when learners indicate that they don’t know what I’m talking about, I feign shock and send them to the library with a stern finger-wagging. It is such a shame that people think literature and literary history begins in the Renaissance – when all of literature is accumulative. Imagine if Thomas Stearnes had not read classical literature? What would ‘The Wasteland’ be? And to think, some learners attempt ‘The Wasteland’ without even knowing about Langland… let alone classical literature.
Post-classical poetry remains a footnote to Plato’s playful dialogue, Ion, in which Socrates explores the nature of poetry and the art and skill of the poet. Post classical poetry didn’t come along with much more until Dante, but like post-classical philosophers, Dante asks different questions. In our post-modern age, we devote little time to pursuing beauty, truth and virtue; the role of the poet, once a life sentence for the elect, is now a lifestyle choice in the market place.
They have a place, but I think it’s worth qualifying that place. Where allusions to classical mythology is used as a lazy shorthand to load a mundane observation with more significance, then it fails. If classical mythology is being modernised (eg a manga version of the Odyssey, previously “West Side Story” modernising “Romeo and Juliet”) or a new slant on a familiar story is being explored then it works. If the poem is good enough, people will make the effort to research and understand the source. If it’s not, people won’t bother.
Leonard Cohen was complaining that he couldn’t write songs with Biblical references anymore because people didn’t know what he was referring to. But I think that’s just a reflection of the fact that teaching has become broader and people aren’t brought up learning the same references anymore which makes the texture of the global tapestry much more interesting.
I think along the same lines. Poetry has been around for a very long time and when I read into the lives of men and women who wrote about the human condition centuries before the arrival of the typewriter and our precious laptop, I can only feel
sorry for those aspiring writers today who fail to grasp the connection.
The references are everywhere. On top of that we have inherited a body of work
that proves we are not alone.
Classical mythology is an enormous cultural resource for poets and has been used by many of them- Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts being just one of an almost endless list -until a recent fall from favour. Nowadays a poem using allusions to classical Greek myth often seems to be regarded as elitist, out of touch and inaccessible.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only does classical mythology deal with eternal themes of desire, death war and power, but its whole philosophic tenor is a useful corrective to hyperindividualism by reminding us that there are limits to our ability to control the world around us. As well as these large themes, the myths also touch on more immediate human traits and qualities – greed, the experience of frustration, moral and physical courage, cunning, generosity, the limits of knowledge and the inability to keep secrets.
From the point of view of writing poetry, anachronism can be a very powerful device, bizarre comparison can be funny, and the chance to rework a good story shouldn’t be passed up. I have written a few poems recycling classical themes and some of them even got published – not in Magma! It is a narrow and uninspiring view that just because something is very ancient it is of no value now. The fact of the survival of clssical mythology indicates that it has had a resonance for many,for many centuries.
I like the way classic tales can be reinvented, subverted, turned inside-out and upside down. Example: Orpheus doesn’t look back, rescues Eurydice after all — and loves with the consequence of meddling in the ineffable.
I meant to write ‘lives’ but the keyboard adjacency of ‘i’ and ‘o’ provides another lesson in poesy.
Of course classical mythology has a place in modern poetry!
I have always loved the Classics and they will continue to inspire me for years to come – I’m only just 30 so not too out of date with the “youth of today”!
Also – only yesterday I heard a small child running through my estate shouting “I am Perseus” – he couldn’t have been older than 9 or 10 and he (like me) lives in a council estate – if that’s not a sign that the classics are well and truly alive then I don’t know what is!
Richard, you’ve just made me VERY HAPPY.
What worries, me, pace Emma’s comment, is that contemporary culture is now entirely predicated on a belief that it – whatever “it” is – is better than everything else! Like it or not, we are part of a continuum; we’ll be gone soon. We are part of a civilisation that grew up out of other civilisations. Now, those earlier civilisations had stories they told themselves about how things work, just as we have stories. They – the biblical stories, and also the classical ones that got mixed up with them – form the basis of our civilisation’s story about itself. What it is, who we are, what life is for.
Right now, as a culture, we don’t know what life is for. We just don’t. To say these stories have only a “qualified” relevance or importance or whatever is pretty much saying our whole civilisation doesn’t matter.
It also exposes terrible ignorance. The Middle East, for example, still lives by those stories. Not to think they’re any more important than anything else is a bit blinkered, is it not? Even the classical myths, if you ever want to understand what you see in a national art gallery or in the theatre or wherever, you’d better at least read them! And it’s scary, because real knowledge really does get really lost! I know lots of supposedly intelligent people who would all say we don’t need the old stories, and the surprising thing is that all these people are under 35. Something really did change.
The question is much bigger than being just about contemporary poetry, of course. We’re in the decadent period of our civilisation. We can be as decadent as we like, but we should know – and you can tell from ancient history and myth – that decadence usually presages a collapse, and then a terrible Dark Age.
By the way, my kids loved Jason & the Argonauts and all that – and I was given picture books of myths and fairy tales as a matter of course. It only seems elitist if you tell them it’s elitist. Really they’re just stories.
I think it’s hard to use Classical mythology well in contemporary poetry just because it’s been been so over-done and tends to be either lazy short-hand for complex ideas (as you mention in your article) or the poet showing off his ‘elite’ knowledge.
I love the Classics, I did a Classics degree but almost never use Greek/Roman mythological references in my own poems.
I think any contemporary poet who does use Classical references really has to justify it in terms of freshness of use (such as in CAD’s The World’s Wife), the same goes for Biblical references.
Are myths relevant in poems? Of course, but no more so than everything else: toothbrushes, pulp fiction, indian braves, brillo pads, Roman haircuts in 1950s cinema, Pirate ships, ping pong balls. I would just as rather see an article asking whether Shakespeare, football or Andrew Motion’s poems are relevant to modern poetry. All these things should be available to poets, nothing should be off the menu. But if the question is whether we should attach special relevance and importance to these stories I would say no. I also think it is wrong-headed to feel completely free in alluding to them, in the same way that one needs to be sensitive to the implications of referencing things in French, Malayalam or to the work of Julia Kristeva. It is a massive risk to pin one’s hopes on a reader having read one story out of the thousands available. Which is another great generalisation here- ‘Myth’ we pomp! Ah the classics!- I think we forget that each of these stories was written individually, by people and the variousness and diversity is huge. It is the same as talking about ‘curry’- we import a vague general flavour and it is offensive not to ackowledge somewhere down the line that variousness.
Anyway, when it comes to what we happily call mythology and the classics, some of which I have enjoyed reading (though I am no scholar by any means) I wonder what side of the bed you have to get out of in the morning in order to imagine you might better them. Sure, we can fiddle with them, make them new, but why use the same names, why make it allusion, if we aim to say something different? Each poem is a new thing and more often than not, throwing in Ariadne into the mix feels like dilusion, aversion from the thing itself, not as I suspect the poet imagines, the rooting of the poem in a context of a tradition of story telling, human truth.
Indeed, most attempts to ‘retell’ end up wafting around with the stock footage of myth. I think translations like Hughes’ Ovid is marvellous. I also enjoyed the Paterson, Orpheus, but these were really translations in order to encourage a new appreciation of the originals. I think poets who borrow freely from Myth don’t participate in this exchange as much as they should. We should be wary of whether in allusion we genuinely seek to re-enliven the originals, or whether we hope to forward our own practice by dragging in someone else’s ideas and characters, which afterall, carry with them the weight of hundreds of years worth of reverance and value.
I would put ‘Myth-poems’ in the same category as ‘walk on the beach’, ‘my father has died’ ‘the moon looks beautiful’ poems; all these can be brilliant, moving, wonderful and enliven our connection with the material described, but as poets we can never be too wary of cliche, stock footage and literary in-joking.
I meant ‘dilution’. Sorry. jx
Does Classical Mythology Have A Place In Contemporary Poetry? Yes, yes, yes.
What I think sometimes puts people off is that teaching the classics is considered elitist or snobbish. I think this is another reason why some feel you can’t use them in contemporary poetry. That is despite many of those stories being folk tales that ordinary people (whatever “ordinary people” means) told in their daily lives.
Yet the strange thing is, whenever I’ve seen people told those stories, it amazes me how much they mean to people. Children are hooked when they hear stories of Zeus, Athena, Aphrodite. The success in recent years of Tales From Ovid, After Ovid, The World’s Wife and various verse translations of Homer, Ovid, Virgil all show they still retain their vitality.
As to why this is the case. One is they still say something about ourselves. American psychologist James Hillman uses classical gods to point to various experiences to locate them in our imagination where we might otherwise struggle to describe them. And of course Western literature owes a hell of lot to the classics. Dante, Shakespeare, Pope, Pound, Hughes and many others have retold those stories and reinvented them. All this argues for their continuing relevance.
Reply to Jack Underwood.
Heroic attempt, Jack. However if nothing is neutral, how can toothbrushes, Jason and the Argonauts the battle of Towton be of equal importance? a basic research concept. Each requires different knowledge and understanding of the reader. I think you’re defending the freedom of the poet, rather making a stab at the nature of poetry.
How do we identify themes in poetry: for instance, old Larkin derived much of his work from the quotidien; Geoffrey Hill delves into history and Ted Hughes contends with the power of myth, each domain requring the reader to bring different luggage with him to help make sense of the text.
Nothing’s neutral.
F.J.Williams
Myths and archetypes are, possibly, the only things that last for ever. They might change their outward forms, but people are always going to need them in some incarnation. Robin Hood, or his equivalent in other cultures, will be with us as long as people admire free spirits and dislike overbearing govenrments, and that’ll be a very long time.
Whether or not poets still want to use classical and biblical myths, I think it important students are given an acquaintance with them or much of their inherited culture will be lost to them, because even if modern poets decide not to use those references, poets over the centuries have done so, and a whole layer of meaning is missing from many works for those like the student who once asked me “Who’s Lazarus?”
I use those references from time to time because they come naturally to me; they are part of what I grew up with and it’d be strange if, in my mind, Odysseus were not emblematic of a far-traveller or Loki of a dark alter ego.
Francis Lauderdale Adams was a Christian socialist poet who died near the end of the 19th century. This poem could not be more set in his own time, but he called it “Hagar”, thus connecting his heroine with a long troop of unmarried servant girls misused by their masters:
She went along the road,
Her baby in her arms.
The night and its alarms
Made deadlier her load.
Her shrunken breasts were dry ;
She felt the hunger bite.
She lay down in the night,
She and the child, to die.
But it would wail, and wail,
And wail. She crept away.
She had no word to say,
Yet still she heard it wail.
She took a jagged stone ;
She wished it to be dead.
She beat it on the head ;
It only gave one moan.
She has no word to say ;
She sits there in the night.
The east sky glints with light,
And it is Christmas Day!
It was Larkin wasn’t it who declared he’d have no truck with the ‘Myth Kitty’ and I have some sympathy with that view. Greek and Roman mythology is after all essentially Euro-centric , surely we should be looking into the rest of the world’s mythologies now that they are increasingly accessible.
By the way I somehow managed to become enriched and enthralled by ‘The Wasteland’ without any knowledge of Langland or Aristophanes – like-wise the slightly gaudy narratives of mythological to-ings and fro-ings in Keats were hugely enjoyable without my needing a classical education.
To me. most poets of the second rank simply sound as if they’re in pseud’s corner when they make references to ‘heraclitean fire’ or ‘Persephone’s lupins’ etc.
I’m all for references to the European classics in the same way I’m all for poet’s using the archetypal myths and legends of Wllderland , Ghormenghast or Darth Vader’s Death planet – and of course the hundreds of myths and legends pouring out of India, Africa, the Americas.
And that kid running around declaring he was Perseus had doubtless been reading Alter-Ego comix.
In reply to F.J. Williams
I’m not so sure I agree with you. We’re talking about writing, not about the material referents themselves and as far as I can tell (I may be wrong of course- I frequently am) you are suggesting that toothbrushes, Jason and the Argonauts the battle of Towton are somehow more or less important than each other? In poems they most certainly are not! Of course we must be sensitive to readers and aware that they make emotional connections with the things in poems, but at the same time, as writers, cannot assume the importance of subjects, allusions, objects, no more than we should assume a readerly interest in our own thoughts and feelings. Once we offer things up they are neutral (though I don’t like that word, it makes it sound characterless and things can be non-hierarchial and yet diverse in character: cheese and onion Vs Stoat and Leek for example.
As Barthes says (and I’m not in the habit of quoting Barthes!):
‘As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside any function other than that very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.’
In this sense the moment we use a word in a poem all our own feelings about anre rendered back to the mere sign of the word itself and thereafter only the reader can assume a hierarchy of importance, a hierarchy we cannot assume, nor should we if we wish to genuinely make enquiries in poems.
The question is, who are your readers going to be? Classical mythology simply isn’t as well known as it once was besides the world is a much smaller place and we have a wider cultural base to plunder that most people will be able to relate to. It’s also been a bit overused – thank you Romantic poets – and veers towards cliché nowadays. I would do better talking about the Star Trek episode ‘Who Mourns for Adonis?’ than to reference Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
But I do see what you mean about neutrality in terms of the risk of readers knowing stuff and by my own argument a myth is just as likely to be known about as a toothbrush, or rather since we can’t possibly know what the reader knows, neither can be seen as a safer allusion.
But then if we say ‘because we do not know what a reader does, we can write anything we like’ we ignore that often forgotten question of what is boring, alienating, or exciting, we pretend we don’t know, which is an error.
I suppose the rational and perhaps obvious conclusion would be that mythical allusion is going to be more rewarding to those whose have read mythical works since otherwise the allusions themselves are merely phatic, even if they do add a flavour, the shapes of the words have a character which exists outside of meaning. My problem with alluding to myth is that often such allusion depend on the meaning of the reference, so those who haven’t read the myth or whatever, are left relying on the character of the words comprising the allusion and the poet hasn’t considered whether this is enough to go on. As with the earlier comment about the Wasteland, the allusions there are part of the texture of the language, so much by design that even if you don’t get the joke, it still sounds funny, the reward is in the wording, the sense derived from it.
With much classical reference I have found (though this is not always the case) that a what you are left with outside of the reference, is rarely rewarding in the same way. I find things in poems I don’t get all the time, all the bloody time, but usually, if the poet is good enough and considerate and engaged enough, some sense of the thing can be made on an sensory level, or after interrogation within the poem itself and without the aid of Google.
I stick by it then, that since nothing can be assumed of a reader, as writers we should be wary of setting up such dependancies on allusion since they can potentially be a distraction from the enquiry of the poem itself. Caution. Caution.
In reply to Jim Murdoch,
I agree, yes Startrek is as important as classics and perhaps more exciting since it’s texture is newer, untrodden (though no doubt reliant on the same universal/humanistic truths as myth/classics). Trouble is of course that just as few/many people will know what you’re talking about!
I guess the trick is to make all these allusions as non-dependant on the allusion as possible!
I’m all for references to anything (be that the “toothbrushes, pulp fiction, indian braves, brillo pads, Roman haircuts in 1950s cinema…”)
I haven’t for a long, long time made references to classical mythology – but I have to other mythologies. Even if it’s just stealing a story.
(And incidentally, what makes Greek/Roman “better” than Norse/Hindu/Mayan/etc.? Nothing, so let’s steal from them as well…)
Here here North
we should be looking into the rest of the world’s mythologies: the basics.
“English poetic education should, really, begin not with the Canterbury Tales, not with Odyssey, not even witgh Genesis, but with the Song of Amergin” – Robert Graves.
And Graves is worth listening to, if only to pause before we reject the belief he was led to possess after ..
..the age of fiteen, poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles, which has sometimes wom me the reputation of an eccentric.
It is a great myth system to acquaint oneself with, because it is essentially the most ancient native british – Brythonic – myth, and unlike Classical Greek, has a very ordered apple pie order to it.
Because it is an island myth, on the frnge of a continental land mass whose were a thousand years ahead technologically at the rise of Rome, and because the tales documented in this British systerm were done so at the earliest stage of writing in the 5C, and also because we have a proto-language – ogham – to puzzle our life away trying to crack as the ultimate British head-fucker for gassing about ‘real’ poetry, in a black and white printed history that stretches unbroken to druids – we have a genuine hand to engage with the hands of others who paint the world of poetry in such a way as they use ‘inferior’ and lesser and minor and all that rubbish the tight assed Tom was bonkers on. When he was playing the plassie English poet.
The great thing about the bardic course of study, which was a real-life 1200 year printed tradition, beginning in the 4-5C, after couple of hundred years of faffing about with ogham, and by the time it really died out circa 17-18C — it had been the British tradition for 1200 years in print, which i am willing to bet, 90% of poets know zip about.
Which is great gas, because the study course was 12 years, and so people in the modern tradition who can turn out tedious bores by their mid to late twenties, because the glide from Newdigate to PL fluffer, in seamless traditional route to fame and success as modern English poet – tends to insulate them from any direct criticism, due to the political set up, in which any negative cover is screened out, and a make-believe status quo in which success in a 500 year poetic tradition, is founded on and evolved out from, and to this day the same template – jealousy and courtiership, intrique and generally, rich middle class thrusters all trying to be best pals with the main dude, which in poetry of course is the M.
So you guys, the only reference you have, the only seriousness to be mustered, and the entire modern English poetic tradition, based on – what turned out in the ling run to be – blokes competting with each other, hating each other, to see how abstruse they can be in the old oh non mon amis, look i speak a very priviliged language only 1% (if that) can speak. And all for not even half the time the longer, wholly native British tradition ran for in print. If you lot ended tommorow, you have not even half way to where the bards got, and with this reference point and atum, we can detach from the traditional Oxo plummy same-as crowd that are state-subsidised to be in the window, all hoping to bend the knee and get a box of sherry off a billionaire who isn’t interested in poetry. To be that person’s official song-maker with the pwer to make people immortal, for a couple of hundred quid and grands off the state for outreach.
Basically, you lot have a myth that Homer is your main poet, and who was 2300 years dead by the time Renaissance Britian got in on the act of faking connection, to a culture 2000 years dead and 3000 distant, when you decided, hey, aren’t we clever.
Homer’s ghost wants us to cherish, as the inheritors of the most ancient enobling arts known to ..blah blah blah..
The great thing then, is that until year 12, in the bardic, British way of things – you are only messing as a trainee. It’s a no lose rig, because what happens is, after eight years, you get to see a skeleton few others do, which amounts to one’s Poetic.
With Homer, unless you are genuinley into BC gear, it’s all an act. The great thing about doing it the oldest most genuine British way, is that thye template is superior to that of Greece. The last magical rites of Stone Age poetry, prior to the Iron Age collapse which led to Troy and all that nonsense – was on your island, and you don’t even have a clue as to it, because..?
Because it’s all just a game.
Gosh!
Gosh indeed.
And one slight correction… ogham was (is) an alphabet. Not a language. Nor even a proto-language. It was used for old Irish and an early form of Welsh. As the link says…
s
There is a deep pool of feeling that is generated by mythology, which is one of the reasons the stories have endured. Think of Medea killing her children, or Clytaemnestra’s murderous revenge on Agamemnon, or Paris falling for Helen. There are archetypal characters and situations in those stories far too potent and exciting to dismiss. Of course we must draw on that deep pool with wisdom and sensitivity and have something fresh to say, but why ignore such riches if they are there? That seems to me just perverse. The question of subject matter and content always comes down to the same old same old. Whether it’s ping pong balls, rugby, or Helen of Troy, it’s what you do with it that matters.
Yes deemikay mon amis, and ogham is the alphabet invented by druids and came at a transitionary period, between oral and literate.
A primary text in the bardic curriculum, was the Auraicept na n-Éces, which was first translated by George Calder in 1917, as The Scholer’s Primer, but whose literal translation is something along the lines of ‘The working methods/systems/procedures of the knowing ones. Knowing ones being bardically trained poets.
There are lots of tales, stories and a whole course of study a bluffer can re-connect to now that online dissimenation has made it all so easy, and s/he who does is obviously the most authentic of the British poets. That’s one line of belief anyway.
To angry Desmond Swords:
Your admiration for the Song of Amergin and the Auraicept na n-Éces is laudable, and very encouraging to a Dublin poet who occasionally writes in a mythological vein, but your hectoring swagger is niggling in the extreme and also bloody incorrect! Lambasting what ye describe as the middle class thrusters and the traditional Oxo plummy same-as crowd for their disinterest in ‘a wholly native British tradition’ is woefully, engagingly wrong, and reminds me of the attitude of wealthy Californian teens whose ancestors butchered the Native Americans but who now hang out at reservations and kick up stink complaining about the maltreatment of this peaceful earth-loving community by the oppressive patriarchal regime.
The Song of Amergin is Irish, composed in Irish by an Irish person, allegedy on the day of the discovery of Ireland. The Poet’s Primer is a manual of literary techniques fashionable in the Irish language, long fallen into neglect after the invasion of Ireland by Henry II and the destruction of the monasteries by Henry VIII. Your people, my people. If you want a Welsh myth, have Arthur, a Saxon myth, have Beowulf, or a Norman myth, have Roland — whose song was apparently sung while your nation was created at the Battle of Hastings.
Ogham is an alphabet that is only found carved on standing stones in Ireland. It is relatively simple: it has been decoded and it says nothing very much, gravestones and border-markers and so forth.
The 1200 year ‘printed’ tradition to which you refer is frankly nonsense. The earliest surviving fragments of Irish mythology are all in manuscripts handwritten by monks in the 10th century, mostly from the Continent, often in Latin rather than Irish. They mention that the tales no longer held much interest for the native people (unsurprising as they had been Christian for 6 centuries by this stage) but that they preserve them as an interesting example of alternative theories of history. (Which is a hard one to accept for the hippie-fascists who claim the history of Catholicism is one of woman-hating celibates touring the world and smashing everything that contradicts their own point of view.) After these tales were written down in this brief, short period they mouldered away in various libraries, mostly untranslated and unread, until Irish independence in 1922 when our new rulers ran amok like headless chickens, rhapsodizing about elves in a frenzy of national pride.
And I have a personal horror of poems like the ‘Hagar’ above, where a poet attaches a mythological title to a bog-standard contemporary squib, in an effort to slap on a dollop of ‘resonance’.
Ahem. That aside, I study Greek and Latin and I’ve written many a poem with thefts from the Mediterranean: unsuccessfully, as a rule. The best of them was about a tramp who claims to remember previous lives as men who inspired various myths (i.e. real people whose lives were distorted and elaborated in the stories of Odin and Orpheus and Finnegas). No mythological names and titles were waved around, in an elitist or other fashion; it was more an attempt to fathom the minds and lives of these chaps in their own words. With a bit of subtlety, myth’s eternal. I find a more visceral rather than romantic approach is required.
Hello Concubhair O’ Anonymnous
Comment edited by moderator
You say the 1200 year ‘printed’ tradition to which you refer is frankly nonsense,
1200 years in print, from 500 to 1700 is 1200 years, and yet you dismiss this.
Thank you Concubhair… You said most of what I wanted to say.
Now I’m off to write a sestina about Odin and Zeus going up Mount Meru for a barney with Vishnu.
Oh, and Desmond… it is entirely possible that Concubhair O’ Muiri is his real name. Being Irish an’ all.
Calm down fellas
C
Yes dm, I may be incorrect. There is one Concubhair O’ Muiri listed as a contestant on a kids TV show, and if this is so and you are Concubhair, please accept my apologies.
It is fascinating that you say the Auraicept na n-Éces had ‘long fallen into neglect after the invasion of Ireland by Henry II’. I would be most grateful if you could expand on this please?
When you say the earliest surviving fragments of Irish mythology are all in manuscripts handwritten by monks in the 10th century, mostly from the Continent, often in Latin rather than Irish, please can you expand on this. The Irish language has been around in print at this point four four hundred years, and was just coming out of the Old Irish period in the 10C, about to go into Middle Irish.
I don’t quite know what your argument is C. When you dismiss as nonsense, the fact that by the 18C, Gaelic had been a written language for 1200 years, and call me arrogant, surely it is you who is guilty of arrogating yoursefl the role of know-all on this myth system.
I am very pleased you are immersing yourself in the Classical sphere of learning. My point is only that there is a myth system, bardic, a 1200 year tradition that is from these islands, with a well documented 12 year course of study, going through seven grades from beginner to poetry professor, and it is a system you blithely dismiss as nonsense.
I have the Greek myth apple pie, after writing over a million words during the trainee period of the first eight years studying how to be a poet in the bardic tradition, and it exhibits fascinating patterns. It all begind with Chaos and then Gaia comes along and mates with the sky to make 12 Titans, six of each gender, who end up deposing their parents, and end up deposed in turn by their 12 Olympian offspring – six of each gender – and the whole written shebang tracing to the 8BC poet Hesiod, writing just at the end of the Greek Dark Ages that happened 1100-900BC.
I am with Robert Graves on the basic philosophy, that by the time we get to the third generation Olympian myth, what we are seeing is 1000 years of continual disorder, which began towards the end of the Greek Bronze Age, in 1500BC, when the island of Thēra (modern day Santorini) erupted and Minoan Crete which had been a peacable trading culture since 2800 BC, was displaced by Mycenaean culture, whose raison d’être was not to get along by peacable trading, but to use the new and superior Iron technology, as the foundation on which to just go in and take what was previously traded for.
The evolution of Greek myth reflects the fact that we begin with one Earth goddess, and then their kids the Titans bin off mommie, which is clearly the new warrior cultures in which silly men elevate themselves to most important, just bnecause they are hard and butch and can get what they want using the new clever technology of Iron.
By the time Hesiod comes and writes the lineage-template of Greek gods, in the 8C BC text Theogony; with the purest, uncorrupted poetic that routes back to Stone Age fertility rites living on only in that pure state, in this corner of the world with the druid-bards — there has been 800 years of slow societal collapse, culminating in the 1100 – 900 BC period, in the time of Troy and the Iliad, when the ancient civilisations of the Levant that had ran for thousands of years, were obliterated by the new Iron Age Armageddon philosophy of Man Only.
So, Hesiod had only hundreds of years of continual war to sing of, and Gaia is forgotten, and all the men are heroes, whereas 1000 years before Hesiod, it was very different, as the palace at Knossos shows us, the poetic rites then, going by the 2000BC frescoes – were officitaed by female hierophants, the priestly class was Woman, and it is Graves position, with which i concur – that the Greek myth we ended up with through Hesiod, is the product of patralineal modes displacing matralineal. Big tough blokes with new Iron toys destroyed everything and we end up with a skewed myth, as per Zeus being more important than Gaia.
It took me literally, millions of words before my own poetic came through, as it is a process of trial and error, writing is, and it makes me laugh that cyberspace is full of people willing to put themselves up as quality controllers, and yet know so little of the bardic lore, which is the most logical course of poetic study to undertake for people from this speck on the globe.
No, they have to be knowing all about the Greek gods and stuff Ogma. Shame.
No. Or at least, not now. Because I, personally, still haven’t gotten to a point where I can see the words “Daphne” or “Icarus” in a poem without having awful flashbacks to the Norton anthology – 19th and 20th centuries. That stuff needs to be laid to rest for a while.
Dear Moderator:
I meant that his information is incorrect: the stuff was written down by hand in the 10th C and printed in the 20th C. Fair enough. But the idea of some ‘tradition’ persisting, like that of blank-verse tragedies for the Elizabethans, is nonsense, as the writers themselves say they only record this stuff as it has been forgotten everywhere also. The Irish have a peculiar hatred of Irish, as every schoolteacher knows — as soon as we discovered Latin and Middle English we were overjoyed to trade up.
To Tanner Wms:
I agre with you. Much as I love mythology, and write the stuff myself, those ruddy anthologies are infested with enough slack dross to drown the rest. It annoys me that, for at least a couple of hundred years, the main way of using mythology has just been to write a completely undistinguished poem (for which a title is hard to invent, simply because it’s so bland and generalised) and then trowel on a Greek name to shine it up.
Thanks for the comment, Tanner Wms. However the influence of the Greeks isn’t restricted to a few dozen mythical names. The Greeks discovered, for example, the human mind, and described its properties. Hence, we can describe our mental acts like reflect, contrast and assimilate. We can actually observe how the discovery of the mind emerged in the drama and poetry of the Greeks. In philosophy, they gave us ways of coming to reasoned conclusions about things.
They were preoccupied working out the principles by which the world worked, as well as human thought, morals and the physical world. The search for virtue and beauty underscored the whole of existence. We seem to have abandoned the search and replaced it with our differing types of despair, as Cyril Connolly would have it.
Best wishes,
John Williams
Hello C.
When you say that you: meant that his information is incorrect: the stuff was written down by hand in the 10th C, I take it you refer to the Auraicept na n-Éces?
Best wishes.
Hurrah, they took me off moderation and did not publish a long and tame piece i will spare boring you with here C.
You give some very broad and sweeping statements, but no detail. What do you mean, please, when you say as soon as we discovered Latin and Middle English we were overjoyed to trade up.
I am just wondering how much Irish myth your familiar with, on a scale of 1 – 10, with one being a few names, and 10 being the full 350 tales and knoweldge of the system as a whole, please C.
thanks very much.
:
Going back to Jack Underwood’s comments, I’d probably agree that Classical mythology is very little different to any other schema of references, whether that be Star Wars, silent movies, quantum-mechanical theorists or Chinese history. They can all provide a convenient, useful and interesting sets of prefabricated relationships to refer to, tease out, subvert and generally make use of. Whether you want ascribe their decreasing penetration of the cultural market to a decline in standards or an increase in the number of alternatives people have access to, Classical mythology has lost its position as the cornerstone of literary understanding. Does this mean that the Classical mythos is now obsolete in poetry? No; but it no longer has a monopoly on cultural capital, and if there is a more appropriate or resonant alternative then there’s no reason why a poet ought to insist on Pluto when Murdoch – but likewise if Pluto suits the purpose there’s no reason to consign him to the dungheap of literary fashion. (After all, he’s already been downgraded from a god to a planet and now to a planetoid – give a chap a break…)
I’m not entirely convinced on the importance of authenticity and consistency with regards to a poetic tradition; while an awareness and acknowledgment of the rules which other people have set themselves and been adhering to is certainly important, engaging with reshaping those boundaries is often more rewarding than simply remaining within them. In that light, an inconsistent, unexpected, inappropriate or simply bizarre application of any mythos can be better than one which superficially fits the bill exactly. (A bad example of this can of course be found in the recent remake of Battlestar Galactica, where Apollo, Athena, et al were appropriated in lieu of a fabricated set of cultural/religious reference points. It was done terribly clumsily and seemed rather out of place – but on a charitable day it can say very interesting things with regards to the show’s attitudes to cultural continuity and the difficulties of writing an intelligent character-driven show without a shared base of cultural references between the characters and the audience.) Surely a ‘tradition’ is an organic continuity with all of the evolution and cross-pollination that this entails rather than a static institution; and in much the same way that we can decry a law as being ‘unconstitutional’ (although admittedly not in a particularly clear sense; the example would work better in America) without making it any less the law of the land as regards the legislative process despite running counter to a perceived historical spirit of the law.
[...] This blog post at the Magma Blog made me go Gah! the instant I saw it. Not because there’s anything wrong with it; it’s just that I’d been planning to write something on the same topic myself. Nothing terribly fancy, at first, but then I thought of asking writers and critics I admired to say something on the subject: what place does mythology have in our writing today? I never got down to doing it, of course. My question had to do with different forms — the novel, the poem, the play and the film. Anyhow, the Magma post has several responses by several very intelligent people, and it’s worth reading through the comments. [...]
Its a turn off for me – mythology is an exclusive club i.e not very accessible to most people – just read some of the discussions here!
Perhaps of interest, on C. P. Cavafy and, among other things, his use of the classical in his poetry: http://www.readingroom.spl.org.uk/classic_poems/index.html
[...] Ho hum. I wonder if it’s because I used classical mythology? I remember reading a post on the Magma poetry blog asking if poems using classical mythology had a place in contemporary poetry. To my experience, no. [...]
Yes, mythology can have a vital role in modern poetry. Mythology deals with the basic questions of our lives and can help poets develop images as they develop thoughts on those basic questions. I look at poetry, not as words on a paper, but as an art that can draw pictures in my mind. In this way, I think mythology, whether ancient Greek or Biblical, share a common ingredient. They both use visual imagery to explain the unexplainable. Death, love, the after-life, the stars, the soul…are all things that make us contemplate our existence.
Take the example of death. One of my favorite poets is Dylan Thomas. I recently read his poem, “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”, which I interpret as an attempt to explain how death has no sting. How in death, we are free from death. Does Dylan Thomas pull his thoughts from the mythological and biblical stories of the end of man’s suffering? Mythology and Biblical stories are full of examples of man defeating death, or conquering death. Is it possible that without these references, we would just assume that we become worm food? Maybe, but when Dylan declares that “Death Has No Dominion”, he may be making reference to our journey over the river Styx to a place where there is no pain, suffering, or death.
In reply to the question:
Does classical mythology have a place in contemporary poetry? I feel that this question has two parts. In the study of contemporary poetry I believe that classical mythology, no matter from which continent or group of people it came from, does have its place. Without mentioning or studying the stories, the poets, the time and civilization from which they came from, and then analyzing them for hidden meanings and lessons would be, in my opinion, reading a world history book that began:
In the beginning, there were three vessels, and these vessels came across the water driven by the breath of some unseen god. And behold Columbus said I see land, and the land is good, and I shall call this land America…ect.
My point being that you cannot study literature without studying the complete history of it.
As for using classical mythology as inspiration for the creation of modern-day poems, I support it. The underlying, and sometimes hidden, meaning of classic poetry, and again to include all countries, is universal that is, dealing with human psychology, development, and sociology. Furthermore, I believe the acceptance of a contemporary poem with ties to classic mythology would depend on the educational background of the audience for which it was written, especially if the poet referenced classical mythology subjects or characters in his or her work.
Does Classical Mythology Have A Place In Contemporary Poetry? Yes I do believe that it does. While most students today do not know all of the stories, I believe that mythology used in poetry, at the very least, provides a small spark of curiosity in those that do not know the background of the stories. With today’s technology further knowledge about mythology is just a “Google” or a “Bing” away. Now that we are in the information age its not to unreasonable to think that students have “friends” in Greece or Italy and getting a “natives” version in the language that they are more comfortable with might even propel the interest even more.