Once, I was riding the Red Line to downtown Chicago and reading Rita Dove’s Mother Love—her 1995 poetry collection retelling the myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone’s abduction by Hades, king of the underworld—when my mother called. We chatted. The Red Line runs on elevated tracks through most of the city’s north side, but once it gets close to downtown, it rolls down into subway. Just before this descent, I said, “Mom, I’ve gotta go, I’m going underground and I’ll lose our connection,” as Mother Love lay in my lap. I hung up, rather delighted.

Delighted, not because the Demeter/Persephone story is a delightful one—its joys are hard-earned—but because the coincidence let my life echo an ancient measure from myth. It’s a gift to get outside yourself. Poets may be stereotyped as excessively introspective or self-absorbed, but we might be at our best when we become, as Baudelaire described in “The Painter of Modern Life,” “a mirror as vast as the crowd itself, a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness”—especially when “the crowd” inhabits not just city streets but even individual imaginations collectively overlapping with all kinds of characters, including those from classical mythology.

Why does the mythology remain?

The past few years have seen extraordinary debates about the place and fate of classics—from its broader status as a field of study to that of particular ancient Greek and Roman authors and texts. Some high-school teachers have congratulated themselves on removing the Odysseyfrom required