Greek Myth in English Poetry: Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson

English poets have borrowed from Greek myth for centuries, but often secondhand. They met the gods through translations, through Latin poets, through Dante, and through statues and vases in London. Reading the poems next to the older texts shows how a myth changes as it travels, and why that change is often the point.

This guide reads five public-domain poems by four poets: John Milton, William Wordsworth, John Keats and Alfred Tennyson. All the texts quoted here come from editions on Project Gutenberg, and ancient passages come from public-domain translations by Samuel Butler and Hugh G. Evelyn-White.

Milton moves the Muse

Paradise Lost opens like a Greek epic. Homer's Iliad, in Butler's translation, begins "Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus." The Odyssey begins "Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide." Milton follows the pattern. After stating his subject, man's first disobedience, he writes:

"Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top / Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire / That Shepherd..."

H. C. Beeching's edition reprints the poem from the edition of 1667, whose title page calls it "A POEM Written in TEN BOOKS." The spelling above follows that text.

Notice the change of address. Hesiod's Theogony, in Evelyn-White's translation, opens with "the Heliconian Muses," who live on the mountain of Helicon. Milton keeps the form of the invocation but moves his Muse to Oreb and Sinai, the mountains of the Bible. He even says his song "with no middle flight intends to soar / Above th' Aonian Mount." The classical frame stays, but the poem claims a higher source than the classical Muses.

Wordsworth wishes for Proteus and Triton

Wordsworth's sonnet "The world is too much with us," printed in his Poems in Two Volumes, uses myth as a complaint about modern life. It begins:

"The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers"

Near the end, the speaker says he would rather be "A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn," if it meant he could "Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea; / Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

The poem doesn't retell a myth at all. It wants the feeling that the sea is alive with gods. Hesiod gives Triton a family and a home: in Evelyn-White's translation, he is "great, wide-ruling Triton," son of Amphitrite and the Earth-Shaker, who "owns the depths of the sea." Wordsworth needs only the name and the horn to call up that whole older world.

Keats: Homer in translation, and a Greek urn

Keats's sonnet "On first looking into Chapman's Homer" appears in Poems 1817, which Robertson calls his first volume of poems. It opens "Much have I traveled in the realms of gold" and ends with the famous image of explorers staring "with a wild surmise— / Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

M. Robertson's edition of Keats's 1820 poems explains why the poem is about a translation. Robertson writes that Keats "knew no Greek," and that the classical stories he loved came to him "almost entirely through the medium of Elizabethan translations and allusions." The sonnet celebrates meeting Homer through George Chapman's English.

The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is the most famous English poem about a Greek object. Robertson dates the great odes to 1819. The poem asks the questions a museum visitor asks: "What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?" It ends with the urn's message, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty."

Which urn? Robertson's note says the poem is "not, apparently, inspired by any one actual vase, but by many Greek sculptures, some seen in the British Museum, some known only from engravings." He adds that the sacrifice scene in the fourth stanza "strongly recalls certain parts of the frieze of the Parthenon." If you want to try Keats's questions on a real pot, our guide How to Read a Greek Vase shows how.

Keats borrowed from paintings, too. In the "Ode to a Nightingale," he wishes for a beaker "Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene," which Robertson glosses as "the spring of the Muses on Mount Helicon." A few lines later he flies away "Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards." Robertson's notes say Keats was again thinking of Titian's picture, which an earlier note identifies as Bacchus and Ariadne in the National Gallery.

Tennyson's Ulysses owes as much to Dante as to Homer

Tennyson's "Ulysses" is a monologue by the old king, who cannot rest at home: "I cannot rest from travel," he says. It opens "It little profits that an idle king, / By this still hearth, among these barren crags" and ends with the hero setting out once more "To follow knowledge, like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."

John Churton Collins's edition of Tennyson's early poems notes that the poem was first published in 1842 and was written soon after the death of Arthur Hallam. Collins makes a striking claim: "It is not the Ulysses of Homer, nor was it suggested by the Odyssey." He traces its germ to the twenty-sixth canto of Dante's Inferno, where Ulysses tells of sailing into the unknown.

Compare Homer. Butler's Odyssey opens with a hero who suffered much by sea "while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home." Homer's Odysseus wants to get home. Tennyson's Ulysses has come home and wants to leave. The poem still names Telemachus and the "aged wife" from Homer's story, so it blends two traditions rather than choosing one.

How to read a myth poem

• Find the version the poet actually knew. For Keats it was Chapman's translation; for Tennyson, Dante as much as Homer.
• Read the ancient passage side by side, in a public-domain translation if you want to quote it.
• Watch the names. Older translators such as Butler often use Roman names like Jove and Venus for Greek gods.
• Ask what the myth does for the poet's own time. Wordsworth uses Triton to criticize "Getting and spending"; Milton uses the Muse to claim a biblical theme.
• Notice where the poem departs from its source. The departure is usually the poet's argument.

Key takeaways

• Milton keeps Homer's invocation but sends his Muse to Sinai instead of Helicon.
• Wordsworth's sonnet uses Proteus and Triton to say modern people have lost touch with nature.
• Keats knew Homer through Chapman's translation, and his Grecian urn combines many works, not one vase, according to Robertson's notes.
• Tennyson's "Ulysses," first published in 1842, draws on Dante's Inferno, and its hero wants to leave home, not reach it.
• Reading poems beside their sources shows what each poet chose to change.

Sources

• John Milton, The Poetical Works of John Milton, edited by H. C. Beeching, Project Gutenberg
• William Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes, Volume 1, Project Gutenberg
• John Keats, Poems 1817, Project Gutenberg
• John Keats, Keats: Poems Published in 1820, edited by M. Robertson, Project Gutenberg
• Alfred Tennyson, The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, edited by John Churton Collins, Project Gutenberg
• Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Samuel Butler, Project Gutenberg
• Homer, The Iliad, translated by Samuel Butler, Project Gutenberg
• Hesiod, Theogony, in Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (1914), Project Gutenberg