Myth-kitty and Stevie Smith

In yesterday's post "Octopods with bright and dark eyes, and Mithrandir," I posted this image, in which a baby playing the role of Gandalf confronts not a Balrog but a kitty.

Gandalf had entered the sync stream because of the similarity of his other name Mithrandir to Mithras, and I also posted these lines:

They never let Mithrandir

Join in any randir games

This juxtaposition of a Mith-name and a kitty made me think of Philip Larkin's famous dismissal of what he called "the common myth-kitty." Then I realized that his name, Philip, was a link to the randir pun, by way of my July 2020 post "Philip as a Christmas reindeer in polyvalent perspective."

I realized I'd never read the complete quote, just lots of references to "what Philip Larkin called 'the common myth-kitty'" and such. I tried to look it up and still couldn't find the original context, but the interesting thing was that the first result for "common myth-kitty" wasn't about Philip Larkin at all but about Stevie Smith:

Perhaps being named Smith invites this sort of thing. I've lost count of how many times I've heard Mormonism punningly dismissed as "Joseph's myth." Anyway, I know absolutely nothing about Stevie Smith's work, but just three days ago Bruce Charlton posted "'Stevie' (1978) - a movie about Stevie Smith." Not long before that, he also addressed the myth-kitty, in "Tolkien's subcreated world in Not a modern 'myth'" (May 15).