Use of Greek myths in the poetry of T. S. Eliot and W.H. Auden.

Myth and reality are new additions to the varied literary metaphor, imagery and symbol. Myths
and reality are dearest to the poets. Myth is a traditional story of the early history. The myth tells
us the story of a people, explaining a natural, social phenomenon and typically involving
supernatural begins. The word myth comes from the Greek word Mythos and it means story. T.
S. Eliot and W.H. Auden are well known for using myth and reality in their poets.

Auden’s use of myths within the poem gives him amazing scope to define the varied roles of
artist their work, and of the audience in changed context of 20th century. In the poem “The
Shield of Achilles”, Auden exploits Greek myths to his purpose of delineating a contemporary
world. The contrast between the physical and the spiritual is also at the center in the treatment of
myths. Thetis who is the goddess mother of Achilles Hephaestus and Achilles represent the
classical world. The new shield made by the God Hephaestus symbolizes a contemporary world
that's afflicted with war, violence and dangerous crimes. Thetis may be a mythic figure
belonging to the Greek mythology. Auden activities her for his own poetic purpose of marking
broken times.

In the first a part of the poem, Auden has described the Homeric Shield of Achilles on which
brightness and Shield of Achilles on which brightness and wonder of Greek World has been
inscribed. The vines, Olives trees, marvel status, well admitted cities with ship sailing in the seas
are the beauty of Greek world. He says:

In the part, I get the contrast between the earthy shield of the modern world and the Homeric
Shield. In modern shield, I see the picture of a modern wasteland. I get the picture of the land
which is totally barren without any feature or a blade of grass. There is nothing to eat and no
place to sit and rest. This is the modern wasteland full of clouds to think for themselves and
mechanically carry out the instructions of their leaders and rulers.

In the poem “In memory of W.B Yeats”, Auden mourns for the great poet’s death Yeats. Here
nature is represented in a mythical way. Death is the law of nature. But Auden does not glorify
Yeats. Auden looks upon the death of Yeats the individual as a standard occurrence. His death
did not affect the order of things Yeats dies physically, but his poetry lives after him.

T. S. Eliot was a British playwright, essayist, publisher, and social critic. He is one of the 20th
century’s major poet. The Waste Land is one among his long and famous poem of modernism.
He shows his discomfort for modern life by contrasting it with medieval traits. T.S. Eliot
explained the mythical method to accentuate the experiences of loss of fertility and death in The
Waste land.
In The Waste Land, Eliot’s work of myth is not simply an allusive and metaphorical tactic. In
The waste Land he is presenting:

He draws from the ideas existing within the collective unconsciousness and therefore the
differences in his representations present his own ideas about the human condition.
In The Waste Land, the mythic structures are rehashed diversely proves them as the result of
crude, regular idea. These structures include concepts of life and death cycles, degeneration,
death, decay, purgation, purification, rebirth, and creation. A common thread throughout the
varied mythic structures is that of violence. Violence is important for the completion of mythic
processes. The result of the human oblivious through common observances, which is so essential
to the finishing of mythic structures and which is out and out missing from Eliots "The Waste
Land." The significant trait of the mythic strategy was that it gave a premise to correlation,
serving to the unexpected component of the new work. Practically skeptical incongruity was the
most continuous mentality of the incredible creators of the Modernist time frame towards their
topic, utilized principally with the aim of maintaining a strategic distance from the authorial
weepy compassion of pragmatist nineteenth-century writing.

In The Waste Land as the potential for a rapprochement between genders. This sonnet involves
numerous layers of re-authorizations and reconfigurations of sexual orientation in-legend,
centering upon Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. The Waste Land's treatment of legend ought
not to be viewed as just mirroring a passing interest in humanities. The climax of worries with
myth and gender going back to the soonest verse. The intricate interrelation of the two
viewpoints leaves it muddled whether Eliot's subtle impulse gets chiefly from a worry with
legends of writing or from a worry with mythologies of gender.