The Myth of Nature and the Nature of Myth: Becoming Transparent to Transcendence

The works by the American mythologist, Joseph Campbell, as well as the poetry of John Keats, his “Ode to a Nightingale, ” offer new ways to reimagine our relation to the earth, to dead and to language’s continued vitality. Beginning with a brief overview of some of the tenets of Campbell’s guiding force of the “monomyth, ” which gathers all the various world as inflections of one universal story, the essay then moves into a discussion of Keats’ in order to reveal the power of poetic utterance in reconfiguring a vital mythology. If there to be a renewed mythos, it may come out of a revisioned care of language itself as a transport towards the transcendent or invisible realms of being that poetry exposes us to through aesthetic and linguistic corridors. The purpose of yoking mythology to poetry is to realign along a mytho-poetic axis of insight and understanding.