ABSTRACT
We have found Eliade’s creation paradigm to be useful in comparing and contrasting the poetry of Eliot and that of Morrison. The key is the phrase, ‘the dialectic of the sacred and the profane’. However, we should bear in mind that Eliade, despite allowing for a vision of the ‘coincidence of opposites’, in which the sacred and the profane might be realized as aspects of each other, does not explore in any detail the historicity of this process. While he concedes that profane time is the only time in which sacred time becomes meaningful – since without the former there would be no point in imagining the latter – he pays little attention to the process of profane time itself. That is, he is content to identify the sacred with the past, with the moment of origin, and myth with that ‘eternal return’ by which history recovers the dimension of cosmos. In this chapter, we consider the mythic potential of profane time more carefully.
