Persephone - Extraordinary Renditions: To Hell and Back
To start off the series of readings in the spring term on the theme of ‘Crossing Over:
Myths of the afterlife, afterlives of myth’, I shall introduce some transformations of
Persephone, especially as they appeared in the works of two poets writing in the
modernist period of the twentieth century between 1916 and 1930: Osip
Mandel’shtam (1891-1938) in Russia and D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) in England.
The myth of Persephone received extensive attention during the last decades of the
nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. See, in particular, Andrew
Radford, The Lost Girls: Demeter-Persephone and the Literary Imagination, 18501930 (Rodopi: Amsterdam-New York, 2007) for a good coverage of the myth in
English literature. It has a fifty-page chapter on ‘Lawrence’s Underworld’. I have
examined Mandel’shtam’s allusions to Persephone in a number of articles. Two of
them, both comparative, “Heirs of Eternity: An Essay on the Poetry of Keats and
Mandel'shtam”, Modern Language Review (Vol. 76, No. 2, 396-419), 1981, and
“Contours of the Creative Word: Mandel'shtam's 'Voz'mi na radost'' in Perspective”,
Slavonic and East European Review (Vol 70, No.1, 18-52), January 1992, are
accessible via JSTOR in the Albert Sloman Library’s research database.
Mandel’shtam made the mythologem something of a signature to his interest in Greek
mythology in his second collection of poems, Tristia (1922) and Lawrence turned to
the mythological persona in his poem ‘Bavarian Gentians’ shortly before his early
death in 1930. Kenneth Rexroth has linked this poem with the poet’s ‘Helen’ cycle
(‘A Winter’s Tale,’ ‘Return,’ ‘Kisses in the Train,’ ‘Under the Oak,’ ‘Passing Visit to
Helen,’ ‘Release,’ and ‘Seven Seals’), noting that ‘[t]hey all have a weird, dark
atmosphere shot through with spurts of flame, a setting which remained a basic
symbolic situation with Lawrence’.
My title reference to ‘Extraordinary Renditions’ has three main purposes: (1) to offer
a contemporary tag to think afresh about an archetypal situation; (2) to draw attention
to the underlying dynamic of Persephone’s story; and (3) to refer to the remarkable
transpositions – or renderings – of the myth in modern times.
There are three documents for the first meeting of the Myth Reading Group this term:
(1) Introduction to Session 1 of ‘Crossing Over’ (this document);
(2) Mandel’shtam’s Persephone Poems (which I shall talk about next Tuesday);
(3) Persephone - Extraordinary Renditions (containing the opening sections of
two versions of the mythologem, one ancient and one modern, and Lawrence’s
‘Bavarian Gentians’).
I have also included a fourth document, an appendix on the Orphic Persephone, for
anyone interested in an alternative perspective.
Leon Burnett, January 2012