Phillip Larkin’s distrust of myth, allusion and tradition, as announced by the poet himself (O’Neill and Callaghan, 2011, p. 167), while he admitted that this was perhaps careless on his part, it does set him apart and against the vast majority of the Western literary tradition: Homer and Virgil and the obviously mythological subject of…
Category: Poetry
Myth in Poetry: Heaney
Seamus Heaney’s first four works progressively evolve a myth of his own (Johnston, 1997, p. 140), a myth of violence and of national and human identity. To understand Heaney’s mythical goddess, we shall first look into ‘The Tollund Man’ poem from his Wintering Out (1972) sequence. In this poem, the narrator, who ‘will stand a…
Myth in Poetry: Hughes
In order to analyse the use of myth by poets after the Second World War it is first necessary to briefly discuss what myth is. Although the word has its root in the Greek word ‘mythos’, which basically translates into ‘story’, there is no precise definition of what it entails (William, 2004 : 12). Wagner…
Coleridge’s demonic poems
Many interpretations have been given to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry, especially to his so called ‘demonic’ or ‘daemonic’ poems. Notorious for their ambiguous themes and morals, these have received critical readings varying from the social-historical to psychological and have had critics arguing over the significance of some or such symbol, be it the Albatross of…
The figure of the mistress
In this post I discuss the representation of the figure of the mistress through a close examination, comparison and contrasting the poetry of William Shakespeare and John Donne, paying special attention to two specific poems, Sonnet 138 and “The Apparition”, respectively. The figure of the mistress, a character which is present in much of Elizabethan…
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