Modern Versions of Nostos and Katabasis: A Survey of Homeric Hypertexts in Recent Anglophone Poetry

Abstract

Since its heyday in the 1950s and 60s, myth criticism has been accused of taking a reductive approach to literature because it tended to neglect cultural and historical differences between ancient Greek myths and their current renderings and, more damagingly perhaps, to marginalise the specific properties of literary works that redeploy ancient myths. While this article does not have a New Historicist agenda, it seeks to show how prevalent ancient Homeric myth still is in contemporary poetry, despite the desacralised and often more humble post-Modernist world of current letters. The article analyzes how poets such as Lorna Goodison have gone against the grain of ancient myths (as many feminist writers have done), and in what ways Homer's Odyssey has been given unexpected extensions that provide the battleground not for epic extravaganzas but for familial issues treated in a post-Confessional mode. The study focuses primarily on poems by Peter Redgrove, Ted Hughes, Michael Longley, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, John Montague and Paul Durcan. After having given an outline of the various ways in which recent poets employ myth, the survey focuses on a particular case in point in the field of Irish poetry to show that myth criticism can also be attentive to the specificities of the texts its seeks to examine in an archetypal light.