What is ‘Myth’?

There is…a particular kind of story which has a value in itself—a value independent of its embodiment in any literary work. The story of Orpheus strikes and strikes deep, of itself; the fact that Virgil and others have told it in good poetry is irrelevant. To think about it and be moved by it is not necessarily to think about those poets or to be moved by them…..The stories I am thinking of always have a very simple narrative shape—a satisfactory and inevitable shape, like a good vase or a tulip….Even at a first hearing it is felt to be inevitable. And the first hearing is chiefly valuable in introducing us to a permanent object of contemplation—more like a thing than a narration—which works upon us by its peculiar flavor or quality, rather as a smell or a chord does.

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An Experiment in Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 41.