ABSTRACT
As Europe entered its time of troubles in the twentieth century and as Western civilisation began to disintegrate, its major writers turned repeatedly to the two leading myths of Western literature, those featuring the figures of Ulysses and Faust. A century before Auerbach, the even more renowned poet and critic Matthew Arnold saw the fundamental temperament of the West as compounded of the Hellenic and the Hebraic. The former, he held, was disinterested and flexible, full of sweetness and light; the latter was practical, disciplined and dogmatic. The balance between Modernism and Tradition was a constantly changing one in the works of the great masters. Eliot, who began as a Modernist, gradually turned back to Tradition retreating from The Waste Land to the Four Quartets, in a step-by-step withdrawal from the Modernist poetic techniques previously outlined back to a traditional meditative voice.
