Eliot sees myth and ritual (the use of anthropological material) as a potential means of ordering and transforming into significance contemporary experience.

Their technical function seems to have been more important to him than their symbolical meaning.

By November 1923, after The Waste Land’s publication Eliot is even more explicit about this problem. The very title of his review in The Dial of Joyce’s Ulysses makes the point: Ulysses, order and myth.

He sets out to answer to the challenge of readers who in terms used by many early readers of The Waste Land saw Ulysses as “an invitation to chaos, an expression of feelings which are perverse, partial and a distortion of reality”. Eliot in answer to this, calls the work classical and complains that people have underestimated the importance of the Odyssey parallel as a structural device.

“In using myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. It’s simply a way of controlling and ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”

Eliot’s own technique for presenting “the immense panorama” is different from Joyce’s. By compression and allusion he condenses myth where Joyce expands the moment almost to infinitude, but both resort a black-cloth of mythology to hold their material in share.