The temptation to see him in mythic terms is understandable.

So Jan Morris's readers are free, perhaps encouraged, to think of a writer's labors in mythic, cosmic terms as part of post-Edenic compulsion.

It chastises 19th- and early-20th-century American artists who, it asserts, imagined the settlement of the West in mythic terms that served the interests of their rich white patrons.

Since that time, "rainbow over Texas" has become a colloquialism for anyone who self-aggrandizes their own life in mythic and fantastical terms.

When he was 10 (he will be 19 on Tuesday) he was already being talked about in all but mythic terms.

In mythic terms, Wallace K. Harrison designed the wings for the Icarus of midcentury New York.

Kieran remembered thinking it all so much rhetoric-platitudes couched in mythic terms.

In the Soviet Union, where medical care is free but widely distrusted, American medicine is seen in mythic terms and doctors are considered miracle workers.

And as the historian Richard Slotkin notes in "Gunslinger Nation," the result "translates the political and ideological paradoxes of the Vietnam War into mythic terms."

Two novels have cast Ovid's story in mythic terms, using images that crash like cymbals, and a brazen, sonorous rhetoric.