The Mythographers and the Romantic Revival of Greek Myth

Abstract

That the english romantic poets were much more seriously interested in Greek myth, both in itself and as a subject for poetry, than their eighteenth-century predecessors hardly requires demonstration. The divergence may be suggested, admittedly in somewhat exaggerated form, by juxtaposing two quotations: Addison (in Spectator 523) congratulates a new poet because he “had not amused himself with Fables out of the Pagan Theology,” unlike the fashionable poetasters who filled their works with the exploits of river gods; and Keats hopes (in the Preface to Endymion) that he had “not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece, and dulled its brightness.” The poet who uses the “pagan fables,” Addison suggests, can only be amusing himself; while for Keats those fables have become “the beautiful mythology of Greece,” which the poet scarcely feels himself worthy to touch.