For decades, T. S. Eliot’s famous “mythical method” dominated modernist studies of myth, rendering modernist literary engagements with myth that diverged from Eliot’s method all but invisible. As James Nikopoulos writes, Eliot’s mythical method “has been the starting point for discussions...of modernism as a whole” and “[it] conditioned how we think of modernity, of myth.” (292) As Eliot’s critical star faded in modernist studies, scholarly engagement with modernist myth slipped from a mainstay of modernist studies into an old-fashioned area of critical inquiry. And yet, many modernist writers—especially those whose work has come into focus as modernist studies expanded—employed myth in their work for ends very different than Eliot’s. Whereas Eliot’s mythical method urgently sought ways of “controlling, of ordering” the jumble of modern life, an impulse Jean Mills characterizes as reaffirming masculine hierarchies, others sought to reclaim space for marginalized traditions and destabilize the control and order of colonizing epistemologies, often by engaging with Eliot’s outsized influence. This session highlights a resurging interest in modernist myth that challenges the orthodoxy of Eliot’s prescriptive criticism and centers global modernists.

Levi Thompson, author of Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry (2022), engages the work of preeminent Iraqi Tammūzī poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (d. 1964) as a nuanced and productive example of how the mythical method itself challenges Eliot’s Western perspective when brought back home to the Middle East. When the Egyptian literary critic Lewis Awad (d. 1990) wrote that “our generation reads Valéry and T.S. Eliot, and we do not read al-Buḥturī [d. 897] or Abū Tammām [d. ca. 845/46]” in the introduction to his 1947 collection of experimental poetry, Plutoland, he signposted how modernist poets writing in Arabic looked to Western modernism, especially Eliot’s poetry, for thematic inspiration. Despite Awad’s contention, many Middle Eastern modernists used Eliot’s “mythical method” to bring the history of Arabic poetry together with the same ancient Near Eastern myths that had inspired Eliot, including that of the Mesopotamian deity of death and rebirth, Tammūz. By the end of the 1950s, the Arabic Tammūzī poets, named after this same god, had made a place for themselves at the forefront of Arabic modernism not by adopting Eliot’s poetic style and invocations of myth wholesale but rather by creating their own brand of modernist “mythical method” informed by the Arab-Islamic turāth cultural heritage of their own poetic tradition.

BK Clapham (he/they), a PhD student working on literature of the African diaspora, engages with black modernist myth making as one of several proto-afrofuturist genealogies. Their presentation will examine Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) as a modernist text that challenges Eliot's mythical method. Whereas Eliot defines the mythical method as a foundational "way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history," Toomer's Cane uses the hero's journey to (re)order and (re)form modernity vis-a-vis the hauntings of slavery; creating New World mythologies that, according to Patrice D. Rankine, serve as a site of Jungian transference for conscious experiences. Cane weaves transcultural mythic symbols with the cultural vestiges of slavery (sorrow songs, conjure magic, African and American-derived nature epistemologies, etc.) to upend Eurocentric notions of classical myth as idealized form for unity or organization. And, they argue, Toomer's autobiographical hero's journey as a mixed-race man seeking to traverse and transcend the color line in early 20th century America was a form of mythic self-making.

In the same vein of cultural recovery, Paul Robichaud, author of Making the Past Present: David Jones, the Middle Ages, and Modernism (2007) and Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return (2021), examines David Jones’s embedding of myth throughout his oeuvre, drawing particularly on the The Grail Mass manuscripts, arguing that Jones revises and challenges Eliot’s method in The Waste Land. Whereas Eliot employed classical and Arthurian myth ironically, gesturing toward modernity’s fragmentation of tradition, Jones attempted an allusive recovery of a Welsh cultural past. Though aware that the kind of art he was attempting “may no longer be possible,” Jones wove allusions to classical and Celtic myth into his poetry as a means of forging meaningful connections to those traditions. Rather than Eliot’s method, Jones adapted Clive’s Bell’s idea of ‘significant form’ to structure his literary texts, within which the myths of diverse cultures become part of a web of allusive meaning.

Together, these papers explore the complex ways global authors interacted with Eliot’s mythical method to draw on mythic traditions without exoticizing them.