230 continued displacement of myth is an evidence not only of the shifts in sensibility, but also of the ability of art to validate and to absorb fully the historical view of life and reality. Thus, when we find that although the modern myth like the Romantic myth is man-centered, the image of the man as hero is neither a Titan nor a Don Quixote, we can attribute this picture to the modern psyche crushed and disintegrated by the pressures of the city which the hero is expected to build despite his inevitable pathetic destiny. That he, like Ezekiel's unfinished man, is a weakling and perishable creature who is easily defrauded by the tyranny of the city or by his own incapacity, is in tune with the facts of modern existence. Ideally, men strives to build a community of beings, but the city actually turns out to be a fallen city with all the symptoms of a mass-culture that devours its own creatore The central power that lends order to life and the city is love, but the city is lifeless, indifferent and inhuman. As a kind and affectionate mother, nature is in harmony with man and helps to recreate his vision, but nature either does not mourish the city or is preeminently hostile to ito In a sense, the modern myth is anti-heroic, and this quality of the myth is in keeping with the mythos of irony and the character of the modern man.3 However, Ezekiel's feet are in several tranditions: on the one hand. The Unfinished Man shows in general sense a close affinity with the post-war poetry and the psychological and social determinism of the twentieth century; but on the other hand, one discerns in it a hidden and powerful yearning of the spirit, somewhat like the Romantic nostalgia, for the lost home which is the vision of the world before the fall. This conceptual frame of reference is intended to suggest not a p^iori^ but only such critical attitudes as will help us in understanding the nature of the myth, the structure of imagery and Ezekiel's vision in The Unfinished Man, My approach is rather empirical and I am concerned with each individual poem as well as the central image of the unfinished man. II Almost all the poems in The Unfinished Man are epistemological in character: they are mental excursions into some specific aspect or problem of existence. The failure, frustration and self-doubt, resulting from such an experience is a part of the larger irony in which discovery as self-knowledge reveals not only startling paradoxes and incongruities of life, but all its ugliness and absurdityo By this congnitive process, the mind tries to grasp the experiential reality and the ontology of existence. Thus, the perceptual process dramatized as a sort of case history -- and most poems in The Unfinished Man are case histories^ -- is essentially introspective and psychic. In "Urban," the persona, like most figures in other poems, represents the modern incapacitated human will which is alienated from nature and the true self and is trapped in an urban wasteland of illusion., The "hills" of vision, unity and perfection are always beyond his reach. The river of life has gone