ABSTRACT
Greek myths, beginning with Homer, or before Homer, and passing through the Ovidian or Virgilian prism, have always enthralled the Western poetic imagination. Twentieth century poets have been surprisingly eager to retell the mythic stories and retell them with a passion that matches the zeal of the Renaissance rediscovering the ancient sources. One can arrange the modern poems in a spectrum, beginning with those that remain faithful to the ancient story and those that transform it to the point of making a contemporary fable. The modern poet then is not a prophet who predicts the future but a visionary whose eyes penetrate like x-rays into the heart of reality and reveal its inner dynamic structures. The poem proclaims the aftermath of the flood, but the myth is filtered through Rimbaud's intensely personal outlook. As soon as the "idea" of the Flood had settled, the world began a series of gestures characteristic of its inner desire to live.
