Visions and revisions: A study of myth in late modern American poetry (T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, H.D., Hilda Doolittle, Muriel Rukeyser)

This dissertation establishes that poems of the 1930's and 1940's generally employ and revise myths and archetypes in different ways than do poems of the teens and 1920's. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and poetry from Marianne Moore's Observations are evaluated at length as adhering to a traditional, or “high” modernist, mytho-poetics. H.D.'s Trilogy and Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead, conversely, epitomize a more radical “late” modernist mytho-poetics.; In general, high modern writers are herein characterized as viewing myth as a stable form and using it to: approach epistemological questions; invoke isolated characters mired in self-awareness and in conflict with their environment; create narratives stressing singular recurrence or perpetual reduction; champion objective concepts of time; ironically overlay stock plots and figures; retrogressively support past social structures as a means of coping with what is bleak in the present and with the limits of creative vision. Myth for this group is foremost an ordering device and interpretive tool.; The “late” modernist, by contrast, approaches myth as not a device to order what and/or how one knows, but a means to create realities, and so: addresses ontological questions; establishes communities united in belief and in accord with their surroundings; opens the possibility of continual recurrence; sees time as malleable and ultimately subjective; creates synthetic or relatively highly mutated plots and characters; progressively promotes new social orders to cope with bleakness in the present and to transcend the limitations of poetic vision. To the late modern artist, myth is a means to creation, a creative tool.; Chapters two and three read and contrast The Waste Land and Trilogy in the context of the myth of the dying and reviving god and the mystery cycle. Chapters four and five examine the mytho-poetics and awareness of American cultural mythology in poems selected from Observations and in the epic The Book of the Dead. Chapter six demonstrates that though Eliot eventually adopts a late Modernist approach to myth, Moore does not move far away from linear and epistemological applications of mythology even as late as World War Two, yet acutely observes and remarks on late modernist myth making techniques in her poem “Four Quartz Crystal Clocks.”...