Home > JOURNALSANDNEWSLETTERS > INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRANSPERSONAL STUDIES > Vol. 24 (2005) > Iss. 1
DOI
10.24972/ijts.2005.24.1.29
Abstract
The works by the American mythologist, Joseph Campbell, as well as the poetry of John Keats,
especially his “Ode to a Nightingale,” offer new ways to reimagine our relation to the earth, to
the dead and to language’s continued vitality. Beginning with a brief overview of some of the
major tenets of Campbell’s guiding force of the “monomyth,” which gathers all the various world
mythologies as inflections of one universal story, the essay then moves into a discussion of Keats’
poem in order to reveal the power of poetic utterance in reconfiguring a vital mythology. If there
is to be a renewed mythos, it may come out of a revisioned care of language itself as a transport
vehicle towards the transcendent or invisible realms of being that poetry exposes us to through
its aesthetic and linguistic corridors. The purpose of yoking mythology to poetry is to realign
consciousness along a mytho-poetic axis of insight and understanding.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Slattery, D. P. (2005). Slattery, D. P. (2005). The myth of nature and the nature of myth: Becoming transparent to transcendence. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 24(1), 29–36.. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 24 (1). https://doi.org/10.24972/ijts.2005.24.1.29