Mythology and the Modernist poetry

Why did modernist writers such as Yeats, Elliot and Pound use myths in their poems?

While studying Modernism literature I was very interested about literacy resources the poets used in their poems and one of them is the mythology. But why did they use this literacy resource, for what purpose?

Looking for more information about it on Internet, I found a research by Allan Wall about the Myth and the Modern writer where he stated some points very interest about it which I connected to some poems we studied in class. That’s what I’m going to explain now.

One of the reasons that interest me more than others is as myths are classical tragedies “they’d found themselves living inside one” (Allan Wall, 2009). We can notice this reason in “The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock” written by T.S. Eliot, since the poem allude to a crisis living by the own writer, Eliot, and the classical tragedy is the Divine Comedy written by Dante. Eliot’s poem has an epigraph which is an extract from Dante’s epic poem in the original language, Italian. Specifically, the extract is placed in the Eight Circle of Hell. The Dante’s Inferno is now the Eliot’s Inferno; he felt his crisis was as the Dante’s crisis.

Another point is the defamiliarization, this means the writer went out from the common way of see things and they saw things from another perspective in order to find new things that were invisible before, but now are possible to see. Also, writers mixed the ancient source of myths with contemporary language to create this new perspective, but to do that they needed to retain plot and characters to reproduce a new contemporary version. At this point, is very important to take into account that they didn’t invent a 'modern myth', they retold the same story. For example, “Leda and the Swan” written by W.B. Yeats, he transformed the violence of a rape at the beginning to a romantic and sensual act of sex at the end of the poem, he used this myth (the same as the title of the poem) and he connected it to the Trojan War when he wrote: “A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead.”, because of this union between Leda and Zeus, Helen of Troy was born.

Painting by Peter Paul Rubens

To sum up, the defamiliarization and the life of a classical tragedy are only two of many reasons why writers used mythology in their poems, these are ones that interest me and think that is very important if we want to understand the poems, because understanding the poem we also can understand the thought of the writers. They used their sensibility, the psychology and the contemporary language to write their poems with the purpose of that we can learn a lot from them. Also, there is a quote from Borgue that makes me sense with all before mentioned: “Myth was there at the beginning of literature and it is at the end of literature too”.

SOURCE: http://www.rlf.org.uk/fellowshipscheme/writing/documents/MythandtheModernWriter.pdf