How can we know the great Goddess again? How worthy are we of that mythical experience? How are we related to that experience in our deepest depravity? And why has the mythical experience grown so opaque to us in our post-Romantic, modern world.

These are the main issues arising out of Western literary tradition that John O'Meara explores in this book.

In the work of Robert Graves, Shakespeare, and Keats, O'Meara sees the deepest expression at once of our most far-reaching hopes and our sadly alienated case in respect of any mythical experience we may conceive of having in the immediate future.