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Concentrating primarily on the work of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Auden, Feder organizes her material into five main sections. In the first she attempts to formulate a definition of myth that she can use to pinpoint critical notions worked out in the course of her subsequent discussion.
In the second of her sections Feder presents the Freudian and Jungian approach to myth and then discovers the way in which that approach has influenced the major writings of the poets just cited; here she places particular emphasis upon the relationship of myth to unconscious processes. In her next section Feder focuses upon the work of Frazer, upon “rite as social expression,’ as she puts it; her subsequent extrapolation would uncover ritualistic elements and themes in the poetry with which she is concerned in section one. Feder's fourth section takes up the problem of myth and history with reference to the thought of Vico and Spengler; again, the major writings of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Auden are examined in such a way as to disclose their indebtedness to and transformation of what Feder terms the Cyclic View of Western culture promulgated in the historical theoretics. Finally, Feder turns to other modern poets and to other modern approaches to myth in an effort to compare the “evolving mythologies” of the twentieth century. More specifically, it is the work of Graves, Aiken, Muir, Ransom, Tate, and Lowell to which she devotes the final pages of her volume. As can be readily appreciated, her overall aim is large; in her own words, she would “indicate how classical myth functions in modern English and American poetry as an aesthetic device which reaches into the deepest layers of personal, religious, social, and political life.” Such an approach, she believes,
elucidates the nature of myth as a key to unconscious mental processes and, at the same time, reveals some of the essential themes, symbols, and techniques of twentieth-century poetry, (p. vii)
Feder's definition of myth is a