T. S. Eliot's Modernized Myth

엘리엇의 현대화된 신화

This paper attempts to illuminate the significance of the myth or mythical method used in The Waste Land, which Eliot adapted from Jessie L. Weston's From Rituals to Romance and Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough. While he was composing a modern epic, James Joyce's Ulysses and Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps made him sure that the mythical method would be the best way to make the non-relational and chaotic modern world into a work of art. Although he accepted F. H. Bradley's epistemology that one's actual experience is non-relational, he strongly put an emphasis on 'the unified sensibility' in John Donne's poetry with which a poet changes all the dissociated material into art. He also found another effective method to give the chaotic experiences an order, and to make them modern art: the mythical method in his contemporary anthropology. With the mythical method he incorporated the various barren, horrible and ugly aspects of modern world into a new unity in The Waste Land. In addition, he embraced his contemporary anthropological theory that a primitive life described in myths is a culture just different from modern culture, and heartily employed some aspects of primitive culture to make modern poetry as well as modern culture rich and exuberant.