There are poets — and they include Shakespeare — who seem to have pursued a policy of keeping their lives away from their readers. Human nature being what it is, it is precisely such poets who are most eagerly read for biographical allusions.
“Emily Dickinson” (1962), Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2005), CW, 17.
Birney, Earle
This is a book for those interested in Canadian poetry to buy and for those interested in complaining that we haven’t got any to ignore.
“Canadian Poets: Earle Birney” (1942), reviewing Birney’s volume David, Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
He has a very simple & honest mind, & tends to be attracted by the simplified clarity of extreme positions. Helps him as a poet, maybe.
Entry, 20 Jul. 1942, 26, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.
Birth
We all belong to something long before we are anything. We were predestined to be mid-twentieth-century middle-class North Americans before we escaped from the womb.
“Criticism as Education” (1979), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Death is not the opposite of life; death is the opposite of birth.
Entry, Notebook 11f (1969–70), 144, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
For death, the Gospel tells us, is the last of our new beginnings: it is not the opposite of life, but only the opposite of birth, until we reach it, when it becomes birth, and in our last and greatest act of renunciation we find that all things have been made anew.
“Sermon in Merton College Chapel” (1970), Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.
… every new birth provokes the return of an avenging death.
“Third Essay: Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.
Bishop, Elizabeth
She spent half her time in Nova Scotia, so much so that one or two Americans suggested Canadians really ought to make her Canada’s national poet. I think it was a bit of a problem for her too to decide whether she was Canadian or American, and she finally solved the problem by going to live in Brazil.
“Autobiographical Reflections: Speech at Moncton’s Centennial Celebration” (1990), referring to the American poet who was raised in the Maritimes, Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (2007), CW, 25.
Black Culture
If the viewer is black and sees a white society gorging itself on luxuries and privileges, the results can be explosive.
“Communications” (1970), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
Black Mass
But the black mass seems to me an extremely literary notion and a rather second-rate literary notion. Aleister Crowley is a good example of the level it operates on.
“Between Paradise and Apocalypse” (1978), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Blake, William
I think I’ve learned everything I know from Blake. Blake was practically the only man of his time who realized that we all live inside a big mythical and metaphorical framework of images, and that unless we become aware of that we can never change anything of the social condition — we just keep on responding to the same conditioning. That was where I derived the notion that literature, as a whole, made sense.
“The Great Teacher” (1988), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
What Blake demonstrates is the sanity of genius and the madness of the commonplace mind, and it is here that he has something very apposite to say to the twentieth century, with its interest in the arts of neurosis and the politics of paranoia.
“Part One: The Argument,” Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947, 2004), CW, 14.
Blake does not exactly say that the Bible is a work of art: he says “The Old & New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.” The Bible tells the artist what the function of art is and what his creative powers are trying to accomplish.
“Blake’s Treatment of the Archetype” (1950), Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake (2005), CW, 16.
If the Prophecies are normal poems, or at least a normal expression of poetic genius, and if Blake nevertheless meant to teach some system by them, that system could only be something connected with the principles of poetic thought. Blake’s “message,” then, is not simply his message, nor is it an extraliterary message. What he is trying to say is what he thinks poetry is trying to say: the imaginative content implied by the existence of an imaginative form of language. I finished my book in the full conviction that learning to read Blake was a step, and for me a necessary step, in learning to read poetry, and to write criticism.
“The Keys to the Gates” (1966), Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake (2005), CW, 16.
… the titles of the sets of aphorisms which introduce Blake’s canon, “There is No Natural Religion” and “All Religions are One,” contain the whole of his thought if they are understood simultaneously.
“Part Three: The Final Synthesis,” Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947, 2004), CW, 14.
Only the Blake — I know Blake as no man has ever known him — of that I’m quite sure. But I lack so woefully in the way of subtlety.
“NF to HK,” 3 May 1935, The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939 (1996), CW, 1.
Blake was the first poet in English literature, and so far as I know the first person in the modern world, to realize that the traditional authoritarian cosmos had had it, that it no longer appealed to the intelligence or the imagination, and would have to be replaced by another model.
“Blake’s Biblical Illustrations” (1983), Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake (2005), CW, 16.
I was originally attracted to him because he was, so far as I knew and still know, the first person in the modern world to see the events of his day in their mythical and imaginative context.
“Third Variation: The Cave,” Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature” (1990), CW, 26.
The conclusion for Blake, and the key to much of his symbolism, is that the fall of man and the creation of the physical world were the same event.
“Part One: The Argument,” Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947, 2004), CW, 14.
Blake’s Prophetic Books represent one of the few successful efforts to tackle conversational rhythm in verse — so successful that many critics are still wondering if they are “real poetry.”
“Fourth Essay: Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.
The question in Blake’s Tyger means: can we actually think of the world of the tiger as a created order?
Entry, Notes 54-5 (1976), 87, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
Whatever other qualities Blake may have had or lacked, he certainly had courage and simplicity. Whatever other qualities our own age may have or lack, it is certainly an age of fearfulness and complexity. And every age learns most from those who most directly confront it.
“Blake after Two Centuries” (1957), Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake (2005), CW, 16.
The only way to crack his code was to take him away from all the mystical and occult traditions that people had associated him with and put him squarely in English literature, which is where he belonged. That was really what took