A characteristic Romantic and post-Romantic tendency in defining myth is the denial of euhemerism, the theory that myths can be explained historically or by identifying their special objects or motives. The resistance to such reductionism is perhaps strongest in the work of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, whose monumental Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is given over in its second volume (1925) to the proposition that "myth is a form of thought." By this Cassirer means to insist that myth is a fundamental "symbolic form" that, like language, is a means of responding to, and hence creating, our world. But unlike language, or at least the language of philosophy, myth is nonintellectual, nondiscursive, typically imagistic. It is the primal, emotion-laden, unmediated "language" of experience. As a consequence, for mythic consciousness there is no reflective separation of the real and the ideal; the mythic "'image' does not represent the 'thing'; it is the thing" (2:38). This literal, as opposed to representational, quality of myth suggests that literature that taps into the recesses of mythic consciousness will reveal in powerful fashion the "dynamic of the life feeling" (2:38), which gives meaning and intelligibility to our world.
Myth, understood in this honorific rather than pejorative sense, has profoundly influenced numerous literary critics and theorists. Isabel MacCaffrey, for example, insists in her study of Paradise Lost that the Christian myth at the center of the epic is not for Milton an oblique representation but rather the "direct rendering of certain stupendous realities now known only indirectly in the symbolic signatures of earthly life" (30). It was for this reason, she feels, that Milton was obliged to give up earlier allegorical plans for the poem: mythic material is simply inaccessible to allegory or metaphor, because it is itself their "cause." A poetic method that emphasizes the separation of "idea" and "image" runs exactly counter to a mythic conception, which insists on their identity.