Myths: Eliot’s Provincialism of the Present

A myth is something that, though it did not occur,

sometimes reveals backsides of history, to illumine

what really happened. While myths don’t always err,

a failing found quite typically in every human,

they may inspire the confused conclusion

that all events in their alternate universe

are with faults of false history in collusion,

a failing only pedants think perverse,

explaining why events that are contemporary

may resemble myths that might not have occurred,

a resemblance that provides to acts that are ex tempore,

alleged meanings which are factually absurd.

What T. S. Eliot deplored, provincialism

of the present, by myths are abolished,

refracting as if with a temporary prism

time’s schisms which their poetry has polished,

causing with great brilliance the past to shine,

even when we are not singing “Auld Lang Syne.”

In “Ancient Greece’s Long Shadow: Historians have for centuries viewed their own eras via comparisons to ancient Athens and Sparta,” WSJ, 9/27/24, Robert D. Kaplan, reviewing

The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present by Oswyn Murray, writes:

A “myth of the past” is necessary to justify “contemporary preoccupations,” writes Oswyn Murray, an emeritus fellow at Oxford. This is a profound realization, and it leads the author to a rousing intellectual defense against what T.S. Eliot called the “provincialism” of the present moment. In an age of media and sensory-enhancing technology that obliterates the past, with all of its lessons, we sometimes no longer seem to be part of a human continuum of the living and the dead, taking sustenance from the trials and tribulations of those who have gone before us. Mr. Murray, to rescue us from the tyranny of the present, studies not only historians but the history of their interpretations, what academics call historiography. This is a noble discipline, since, as the author writes, “in the background of every historian’s work is his own contemporary world.