Myth in Poetry: In Lieu of a Rant

Myth in Poetry

 

When poets reject myth they are rejecting poetry itself, since poetry and myth are intimately intertwined. A poetry without myth is a poetry of the intellect. The intellect can only construct a poem, not create it.

When Tom Verlain writes the line, ‘My eyes are like telescopes’ he is both writing poetry and writing about poetry. Poetry is the perception of the soul and a poem is a story, or myth, about the soul’s experience, either here, on this earth, or in the interworld, which is this earth opened up to its other dimensions. In his essays on Swedenborg and on the Mundus Imaginalis, Henry Corbin says that the interzone is the place that allows the divine and the ordinary to symbolize. It is the place of symbols, or of communication by means of the symbol. When the divine appears in our imaginations it is like an image in a mirror. The organ of cognition in this case is the imagination.

 

‘My eyes are like telescopes’ of course is a simile. It is also a joke. The joke refers to cartoons where the eyes pop out. That’s what’s known as Pop Art. But it also refers to the altered vision of an acid trip. In this formulation the eyes are like telescopes because they reveal a portion of the world hidden from normal vision. A person who has never seen or heard of telescopes or microscopes would laugh at the idea that there are things in the sky or in a bowl of pond water too small or distant to see.

 

So it is with the imagination. The imagination perceives portions of reality not revealed by the intellect or common sense. And it is not only the description of or narrative of these visions and events that make up a poem or other piece of art but sonic punctuation and division of visible form into pattern. The sonic and visual patternings of art are perceptions of higher orders of reality. Art does not exclude abstraction in this sense.

 

The poet or artist who sets out to debunk myth is a self destructive entity. It is like the scientist who does not believe in the scientific method. No scientist would recognize the validity of the work of a scientist who rejected the basic premises of science. Why should artists then accept the validity of theories or procedures of art that deny the existence of art?