Psychocosmos: Crafting Mythopoetry
Elijah Perseus Blumov
“Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time….
illuminating Now and dark Hath-been
with light of suns as yet by no man seen.”
—J.R.R. Tolkien
In the ancient world, the role of the poet was conceived much like the role of the shaman, prophet, or mystic: to receive visions from the beyond and transmute them into stories which could guide the spiritual direction of the people. This tribal role of myth-maker has been remarkably preserved even as society has changed dramatically. Poets like Chaucer and Dante, Spenser and Milton, Blake and Shelley, Yeats and Eliot, have continued in generation after generation to conjure up new mythologies to reveal the human soul to itself.
Only in our own day do poets seem to shirk the responsibility of myth-making, content to confine themselves to an impoverished, quotidian sense of reality even as our need for guiding myths grows more dire than ever. In this course, we will reignite the ancient poetic nerve, investigating how poets in English have fulfilled the role of myth-maker in past ages, and thinking about how to bring our own fantastical inner visions, our own psychocosmos, into the poetry (and yes, even lyric poetry!) of the 21st century.
