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It is Dr. Slochower's great merit to have brought to our attention a type of creativity which forms out of several polarities a new synthesis of great power—timeless, ever modern. He uses for this bridge-building work one term uniting two quite different efforts of symbol formation: “mythos” and “poiesis.” The first is usually understood as an elementary belief in the concreteness of a metaphorical narrative, encompassing a whole world view and using the basic logical categories worked out by Cassirer and, independently, by Freud. Some of the great models of philosophical theoría, of contemplation, are called by Plato m
thoi, “tales”; one may or may not believe them as literal truths, Plato intimates, but they are reflections of a greater Truth beyond the day-to-day experience. Póiesis, again in Plato, is the great force of creativity generated and carried by all powerful Eros or, as Cicero was to call it in Latin, libido, and culminating in what the Greeks more narrowly defined as poetic works: the hymns and love songs, the comedies and tragedies, perhaps even the Platonic dialogues themselves. Creativity, poiesis, poetry—they belong for Plato among the greatest, yet also potentially most seductive and dangerous, activities of man.
The combination of myth and poetry in mythopoesis is of a higher order than its two components, a synthesis far more powerful and enduring than either, as Slochower describes, because, as does every great synthesis, it transcends its parts by far. A few quotes demonstrate this: “… while mythology presents its stories as if they actually took place, mythopoesis transposes them to a symbolic meaning” (1970a, p. 15). More specifically: “…whereas… the myth induces identification