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NEW IMPRESSIONS X

Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry

NICHOLAS HALMI

BEFORE THE PUBLICATION of Fearful Symmetry, Blake

was remarkable among poets for having attracted opposing
but equally dogmatic judgements: a majority view that pro-
nounced his ‘prophetic books’ to be largely incomprehensible,
and a minority view that claimed them to be full of hermetic
meaning. The first treated Blake (in T. S. Eliot’s words) as
‘a wild man’; the second treated him as ‘a wild pet for the
supercultivated’.1 Frye sought to rescue Blake from both kinds
of criticism, offering in their place a ‘grammar’ of Blake’s
symbolism. The most succinct account of his methodology and
its place in literary criticism appears in the chapter that Frye
himself wrote for an annotated bibliography of criticism on
English Romanticism:
Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (1947), the most sus-
tained attempt at a critical translation of Blake’s moral
allegory, locates this grammar of symbolism within litera-
ture itself: in other words, as a result of trying to solve a
specific problem in literary criticism, the argument of
Blake’s Prophecies, this book became unconsciously an
example of contemporary mythical or archetypal criticism.
Thus Orc is Blake’s example of the literary and mythical
dying god, Urizen, Blake’s example of the literary and
mythical father-god, and so on.2
In the preface to the Italian translation of Fearful Symmetry
(1976), Frye claimed that his effort to understand Blake’s
mythology had initially been ‘hampered by most of the existing
critics of Blake, who insisted . . . that the “Prophecies,” in par-
ticular, were not poems, but documents illustrating certain

159
160 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
occult or mystical ideas’.3 But Frye and the allegorising critics
he rejected were encouraged to pursue their respective
approaches by the same characteristics of Blake’s prophecies:
their manifest difficulty and the recurrence of certain charac-
ters, images, and phrases. Had there not appeared to be a
method to Blake’s alleged madness, or conversely had that
method been intuitively obvious, there would have been no
need for anyone to explain it. As Frye noted in an essay
published two decades after Fearful Symmetry, ‘the schematic,
diagrammatic quality of Blake’s thought was there, and would
not go away or turn into anything else. Yeats had recognized it;
[S. Foster] Damon had recognized it; I had to recognize it’.4
Introducing a selected edition of Blake’s writings in 1953,
Frye asserted flatly that the major poems ‘are difficult because
it was impossible to make them simpler’.5 But because difficulty,
in particular self-conscious difficulty, is widely considered a
defining characteristic of twentieth century literature, the
difficulty of Blake’s poetry gives it a ‘peculiarly modern’
appearance, as Frye acknowledged in Fearful Symmetry when
he admonished critics not to assume ‘that any poet writes with
one eye on his own time and the other confidentially winking
at ours’ (p. 19). In the event, this warning was honoured more
in the breach than in the observance, and not only by other
critics. Despite rejecting the practice of identifying Blake with
some manifestation of modernist thought, Frye himself did not
entirely escape the temptation of presenting Blake as a thinker
of as well as for the twentieth century. In Fearful Symmetry he
substituted Freudian for Blakean terms, ‘‘‘libido” for Luvah,
“id” for the stormy Tharmas, and “superego” for the fanatical
Urizen’, to elucidate The Four Zoas (p. 296); in ‘The Keys to
the Gates’ he identified the conflict of Orc and Urizen in the
same work with Darwin’s evolutionary theory, with Freud’s
theory of the pleasure and reality principles, and with
Spengler’s philosophy of history (p. 184). One of the more
acute reviewers of Fearful Symmetry, René Wellek, criticised
Frye for occasionally reformulating Blake’s thought ‘in modern
terms which the texts cannot always support’.6 But perhaps in
such instances we glimpse the anagogical phase of symbolism
that Frye envisioned in the Anatomy of Criticism as a literary
FRYE’S FEARFUL SYMMETRY 161
universe ‘in which everything is potentially identifiable with
everything else’.7
Frye himself, of course, might have objected that his associa-
tion of Blake with Freud and Spengler entailed neither an
anachronism nor a surreptitious teleology because analogues,
unlike anticipations, are not related temporally and develop-
mentally to their conceptual counterparts but merely exist,
irrespective of time and context. In effect, however, it makes
little difference whether a concept is designated analogous to or
anticipatory of something, for in either case an abstracted,
formal – hence reductive, decontextualised – relationship is
being postulated. As far as Fearful Symmetry was concerned,
Frye’s centrifugal inclination to relate Blake to a generalised
conception of poetic creation was largely subordinated to his
centripetal inclination to provide ‘an explanation of Blake’s
thought and a commentary on his poetry’ (p. 11). But a tension
remains evident in the book between these opposed approaches
to Blake’s oeuvre: on the one hand as a means to a more
generalised critical end, on the other as the end in itself of
criticism. Notwithstanding Frye’s assertion that in the study
of Blake ‘it is the analogue that is important, not the source’
(p. 19), he devotes considerable space (notably in chapter VI)
to historicising Blake, clarifying his relation to other eighteenth
century poets, such as Collins and Gray, and occasionally even
identifying sources in the manner of Foster Damon.
The emphasis, in the preface to the 1969 paperback edition
of Fearful Symmetry, on Blake’s representative function within
a comprehensive critical theory is characteristic of Frye’s
conception of his criticism as a unified whole. Under the rubric
of archetypal or mythological criticism, he sought to restrict
the place of change within his work to his consciousness of its
fundamental thematic and methodological continuity and to
his choice of texts. Thus the survey undertaken in Anatomy of
Criticism of the mythological universe of literature as a whole
was to him a natural extension – larger in scope and more self-
conscious in method – of the survey undertaken in Fearful
Symmetry of the mythological universe of Blake’s prophecies.
Not only was the second book impelled by the same basic
insight as the first, namely that literature derives its coherence
162 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
from its inevitable adherence to a framework of archetypal
symbols and myths, but the two books were related synec-
dochally, Fearful Symmetry participating in and representing
the whole of the project realised more fully in the Anatomy.8
Frye’s retrospective view of his first book is not without
justification. In the 1969 preface he averred that his ‘interest in
Blake had from the beginning been of extensive kind’, so that
the subject of the resultant book was ‘Blake in his literary con-
text, which means, not Blake’s “place in literature,” but Blake
as an illustration of the poetic process’ (p. 5; my emphasis).
This remained true even after the fifth and final rewriting of his
book, when he had responded to a press reader’s objection to
its length and unwieldiness by ‘cutting out of it a mass of
critical principles and observations, some of which found their
way into . . . Anatomy of Criticism’ (p. 5). He later told his
biographer, Philip Ayre, of an epiphany ‘that what he really
wanted to do with the book was to write an encyclopedic
overview of all he knew about literature at that time which
would parallel the line of Blake’s works themselves’.9 This is
hardly surprising, for while Frye was writing the book on Blake
he was also researching the prose anatomy, an encyclopedic
literary genre. The affinity he perceived between his two inter-
ests is discernible in the generic chapter titles of a fragmentary
typescript – the only such material to survive – of a late
draft of Fearful Symmetry: ‘Introduction’, ‘Experiment’
(chapter VII), ‘Satire and Tragedy’ (chapter VIII), ‘Revolution’
(chapter IX).10
The enforced pruning of the more obvious manifestations of
Frye’s encyclopedic inclination unfortunately fostered the
impression that the remaining passages of generalised criticism
are largely irrelevant to the book’s purpose. Wellek, for
example, distinguished Frye’s ‘incidental’ dicta – ‘e.g. on the
biographical fallacy in criticism [p. 326], on the false histori-
cism prevalent in literary scholarship [p. 407] and on the
peculiarity of the second half of the eighteenth century’ – from
his analysis of Blake’s poetry (which he found wanting). That
such a distinction is false to Frye’s conception of his critical
task is clear from such passages as the following, which
appears in an exposition of Blake’s understanding of the Bible:
FRYE’S FEARFUL SYMMETRY 163
All myths and rituals hint darkly and allegorically at the
same visions that we find in the Bible, which is why they
have such a strong resemblance to Christian myths and
rituals, a resemblance explained by early Church Fathers
as diabolic parodies or Bibles of Hell, as Blake calls his
own prophecies. There are many great visions outside the
range of the Bible, such as the Icelandic Eddas and the
Bhagavadgita, almost equally faithful to the central form
of the Word of God, and the Bible no less than Classical
legends comes from older and more authentic sources.
(p. 114)
In two sentences Frye not only surveys literature geographically
from Iceland to India and chronologically from prehistory to
the nineteenth century AD, but assimilates it all to the divine
Word so confidently that we almost expect him next, like the
voice out of the whirlwind, to challenge us, ‘Hast thou per-
ceived the breadth of the earth? declare if thou knowest it all’.
In fact he returns to Blake, adducing passages from Milton and
the Descriptive Catalogue to establish that for him too ‘the
Great Code of Art’ is not to be found solely in the Bible. Frye
presents Blake, in short, as at once individual and typical. What
is individual in him makes him worth reading; what is typical
in him makes him comprehensible, for there can be no such
thing, Frye repeatedly insists, as a strictly ‘private symbolism’
(p. 164; cf. ‘The Keys to the Gate’, p. 175).
The conflict between the recurring figures of Orc and Urizen
in Blake’s prophecies was the subject of another epiphany that
Frye experienced while composing Fearful Symmetry (Ayre,
p. 177). What appeared to him was the narrative pattern that
he would call the ‘Orc cycle’, a term that subsequently became
‘so lodged in the common critical vocabulary that [its] origin in
Frye is recalled only with effort’.11 Orc, the son of Los (imagi-
nation) and Enitharmon (sensual indulgence and repression),
represents youthful energy and the spirit of rebellion, or in
Frye’s own words ‘the power of the human desire to achieve a
better world which produces revolution and foreshadows the
apocalypse’ (p. 207). Urizen, one of the four Zoas whose name
may pun on ‘your reason’ or on the Greek verb horizein (‘to
164 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
limit’), represents reason in its functions of restricting energy
and imposing laws (p. 211). Orc’s attempts to revolt against
Urizen are narrated in ‘A Song of Liberty’ (part of The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell), America, Europe, The Song of
Los, The Book of Urizen (plates 19-25), and The Four Zoas
(Nights V-IX).
Using his axiom that ‘in the study of Blake it is the analogue
that is important’ (p. 19) as a heuristic principle, Frye assimi-
lated Blake’s various accounts of the Orc–Urizen opposition to
broader external frames of reference in order to establish an
abstract pattern that he could then postulate as Blake’s own
master-narrative, a cyclical narrative – eterne in mutability – in
which rebellion against tyranny always becomes a tyranny
itself, as Prometheus mirrors Jupiter in Shelley’s Prometheus
Unbound. Orc’s failure to overthrow Urizen permanently
suggests an analogy to the cycles of organic life, and that
analogy in turn suggests further analogies to mythic stories of
the lives, generational conflicts, and deaths of gods (pp. 207-8,
211-12). As the spiral of associations widens, Orc begins to
seem like the hero with a thousand faces, at once himself, his
contrary, and ultimately all of life itself: ‘Thus Orc can be at the
same time a St. George, a Prometheus, a Moses (in Egypt, not
in the wilderness), and an Adonis; a dragon-slayer, a bound
Titan, an initiator of a new human culture, and a dying god.
. . . The Orc cycle has now expanded into the entire process of
life and death which goes on in our world’ (pp. 225, 234).
Frye’s interpretative procedure is derived from biblical typ-
ology, the practice of interpreting persons and events in the Old
Testament as prefigurations of the Christian dispensation.
In particular, Frye’s repeated and widely accepted identification
of Orc with the crucified Jesus (e.g. pp. 139, 214-16, 223, 228,
280, 294) is entirely indebted to a complex, self-reinforcing
series of typological associations, both traditional and Frye’s
own, since Blake himself never actually describes or depicts
Orc as being crucified. First, as a boy Orc is nailed by his
parents to a rock (Four Zoas, Night V, p. 60; Night VII, p. 79),
an action recalling the punishment not of Jesus but of
Prometheus. Yet Frye recognises a ‘parallel’ between the two
figures, both of whom he therefore declares to be ‘allotropic
FRYE’S FEARFUL SYMMETRY 165
forms of Orc’ (p. 139).12 Second, as a serpent Orc is found
‘wreath’d round the accursed tree’ in America (plate 8) and is
compelled by Urizen to climb ‘the mysterious tree’ in The Four
Zoas (Night VII, p. 81), conditions that Frye likens to being
‘bound on the tree of mystery’ and hence to Moses’ attachment
of a brazen serpent, representing the Israelites’ lack of faith, to
a pole (Numbers 21: 9). To connect Orc and Jesus by means of
the brazen serpent is a small step, for Jesus himself interpreted
Moses’ act ‘as a prototype’ of the Crucifixion (p. 214; cf. John
3: 14). Third, Frye regards two characters who are explicitly
nailed to trees – Fuzon, the son of Urizen, in The Book of
Ahania (plate 4), and Luvah, the third of the four Zoas and
a symbol of love, in The Four Zoas (Night VII, p. 92) – as
manifestations of Orc. If Fuzon and Luvah are identifiable with
Orc on the one hand and with Jesus on the other, then it
follows that Orc must be identifiable with Jesus. With such an
intepretative method at his disposal, Frye could relate almost
any work of Blake’s to the basic pattern of the Orc cycle, and
the Orc cycle to almost any other work of literature. He was
now in possession of the organising scheme he needed to
complete his book.
While some critics who acknowledge themselves to be
indebted to Frye, such as Harold Bloom and Hazard Adams,
are more generally accepting of the idea of the Orc cycle,
others, the particularly historically minded, have expressed
severe reservations about its validity. Mary Lynn Johnson, for
example, questions Frye’s identification of Fuzon with the
archetypal figure of Orc; David Erdman distinguishes the ‘cycle
of history prophetically examined in America and Europe’
from the cycle of ‘rebellion–vengeance–tyranny’ described by
Frye; Morton Paley finds no evidence of the complete cycle in
works earlier than The Four Zoas; and Christopher Hobson,
observing that Frye’s central contentions of Orc’s cyclical
existence and crucifixion have no support in any of Blake’s
texts, rejects the idea of the cycle tout court.13 But despite such
dissent from the content of Fearful Symmetry, there is no ques-
tion that Frye ‘established the criteria for what has become the
magisterial, canonical approach’ to Blake, an approach that
Fred Dotort calls ‘thematic’. ‘All critics who write on Blake’,
166 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
Dotort adds, ‘face the daunting task of differentiating them-
selves and their points of view from books such as Fearful
Symmetry.’14 The book demands to be argued with because it
still demands to be read.
Yet one important aspect of Fearful Symmetry has received
little attention, though Edith Sitwell referred to it in her review
in The Spectator on 10 October 1947. For her the book’s value
consisted not only in its elucidation of Blake’s prophecies but
also in its implied religious message: ‘The chapter, The Rising
God [chapter II] and the chapter The City of God [chapter XI],
with its inspired vision of Jesus, seem to me to be of great
importance to our time’. She proceeded to quote from the
latter chapter Frye’s explanation of how, for Blake, the
Incarnation was re-enacted in everyday experience and divin-
ity realised in humanity. Through Frye, Sitwell found in Blake
an attractive and sustainable understanding of Christianity.
Responding to a flattering letter from Frye in April 1948,
Sitwell proclaimed him ‘the critic we have been waiting for’
and then added, ‘I think you will also prove to be the religious
teacher we have been waiting for’ (quoted in Ayre, p. 206).
The religious teacher in Frye lurked behind the most
frequently criticised characteristic of Fearful Symmetry: ‘One
cannot always be certain whether he is paraphrasing an idea of
Blake’s or promulgating one of his own’, as the reviewer for
The Christian Science Monitor complained in September 1947.
In his diary Frye himself casually acknowledged such reactions,
but without an indication that he understood them: ‘Perhaps
it’s difficult for my students, as it apparently was for readers
of Fearful Symmetry, to know where exposition stops and
commentary begins’.15 Frye’s incomprehension is hardly
surprising, for he ventriloquised for Blake most thoroughly on
precisely the subjects about which Blake spoke most personally
and forcefully to him: the onslaughts against the work of imag-
ination from blinkered materialism and ossified religion.
At the end of chapter II, which Sitwell singled out for praise,
an exposition of Blake’s rejection of Deism modulates subtly
into an assertion of Frye’s rejection of a society that denies itself
the imaginative creation of a myth of freedom:
FRYE’S FEARFUL SYMMETRY 167
we must accept in Blake a certain amount of prophecy in
the literal sense of anticipating the probable future, and
must see in his conception of Deism a mental attitude
which is still with us, the monstrous hydra which is the
perverted vision of human society as an atomic aggregate
of egos instead of as a larger human body. . . . The natural
society, whether we see it in primitive tribes or in exhaust-
ed civilizations, is a complicated mechanism of prescribed
acts which always have a rational explanation, but make
no sense whatever in terms of passion, energy, insight or
wisdom. (p. 60)

In the next chapter, as Frye expounds the connection between

imaginative self-depravation, political tyranny, and perverted
religion, the quotations from Blake sometimes cease to be
objects of interpretation in themselves and are given the
subsidiary role of supporting Frye’s argument:

Tyranny is the co-operation of parasite and host; no tyrant

maintains himself by force, but by trading on his victims’
fears. So although ‘A tyrant is the worst disease, and the
cause of all others,’ the tyrant can at any rate be seen, and
the imagination can handle anything that can be seen. It is
the sense of the indefinite unseen, acquired by turning
away from perception, which is capable of restraining
imagination, and, as ‘everybody hates a king,’ he would
soon be destroyed if there were no sense of a mysterious
power lurking behind him: if, in short, there were no
divinity to hedge the king. . . . Religion of this kind being
invented only to buttress the status quo, it is always ‘State
Religion, which is the source of all Cruelty.’ (pp. 65-6)

Doubtless the first readers of Fearful Symmetry would

have understood the applicability of these paragraphs to the
dictatorships that had just been defeated in the war, but they
may not have appreciated fully that applicability to the victors.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easier to recognise here a
prophetic analysis of what was to happen to the societies on
both sides of the new, cold, war.16
168 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
Apart from those who knew Frye personally, however, early
readers of Fearful Symmetry would not have known that one
of the false religions that he was attacking with the powerful
weapons offered by Blake was the fundamentalist Methodism
of his own childhood, a religion he identified particularly
with his mother, who had insisted on his becoming a minister.
A recollection of 1975 (quoted in Ayre, p. 45) adumbrates
Blake’s assistance with Frye’s liberation from that religion:

In early adolescence I suddenly realized, with an utter and

complete conviction of which I have never lost one iota
since, that the whole apparatus of afterlife in heaven and
hell, unpardonable sins, and the like was a lot of junk. . . .
That was where Blake helped me so much: he taught me
that the lugubrious old stinker in the sky that I had heard
so much about existed all right, but that his name was
Satan, that his function was to promote tyranny in society
and repression in the mind.

But just as Blake helped Frye to shed a religion he considered

false, so he offered him a vision of an alternative, a religion not
of the letter but of the spirit, not of dogma but of imagination,
not of passive obedience but of active exertion. That true
religion is revealed in Frye’s exposition of Blake’s longest
etched work, Jerusalem. Here Jesus, as a vision in the individ-
ual mind, finds his role in showing a way out of the otherwise
closed circle of the Orc cycle. This is the ‘inspired vision’ of
which Edith Sitwell urged the ‘great importance to our time’,
and to describe it Frye employs the metaphor of biological
growth:
The true Jesus is the present vision of Jesus, the uniting of
the divine and the human in our own minds, and it is only
the active Jesus, the teacher and healer and storyteller, who
can be recreated. The passive Jesus can only be recalled,
and by means of a ceremonial and historical tradition. . . .
Blake’s religion is spiritual life, the Christianity of imagi-
nation, art and recreation as opposed to the Christianity of
memory, magic, and repetition. . . .
FRYE’S FEARFUL SYMMETRY 169
To the individual visionary the upper limit of Beulah [i.e.
the lower of the two states of imagination in Blake] is the
limit of orthodox vision, and as far as a church of any kind
will take him. It is a state in which nature is seen as beati-
fied, God as a Father, man as a creature, and the essence of
mental life as the subjection of reason to a mystery. . . .
Many visionaries remain in this state indefinitely, but those
who reach imaginative puberty become aware of an oppo-
sition of forces, and of the necessity of choosing between
them. Ahead of them is the narrow gap into eternity, and
to get through it they must run away from their protecting
parents, like Jesus at twelve, and become adult creators
themselves. They must drop the ideas of a divine sanction
attached to nature, of an ultimate mystery in the Godhead,
of an ultimate division between a human creature and
a divine creator, and of recurrent imaginative habits as
forming the structure, instead of the foundation, of the
imaginative life. (pp. 376-7, 378-9)
The unclear reference of the personal pronouns in the second
paragraph here indicates the dissolution of exposition into
exhortation, and of literary criticism into spiritual autobio-
graphy. It is tempting to interpret the title of Frye’s book as an
allusion to the relationship between its subject and its author;
but symmetry implies separation, which is precisely what is
lacking by the end of the eleventh chapter, where Frye suggests
that ‘some prophet of the age, whether Blake or another matters
little, may achieve the final triumph of the prophet, a triumph
accorded in the Bible only to Jonah, who did not appreciate it,
of finding his prophecy of impending disaster fail because it is
being listened to’ (p. 391). Perhaps Blake had entered Frye’s
foot, as Milton had entered Blake’s (Milton, plate 15).
To insist on the intensely personal nature of Fearful Symmetry
is not to deny its professional contributions to Blake studies. Of
those contributions, only two of which I have space to mention,
the most significant must be Frye’s presentation of Blake as a
poet whose works, taken as a whole, form a single, coherent
mythical pattern, or as Frye himself put it, ‘a unified scheme . . .
in accord with a permanent structure of ideas’ (p. 21). The
170 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
primary impact of this achievement was to liberate Blake criti-
cism in a way that Frye had probably not anticipated. For
although some post-Frygian critics – notably David Erdman,
Robert Gleckner, Harold Bloom, and Hazard Adams in the
1950s and 1960s, and Vincent De Luca in 1991 – produced
their own large-scale, thematically unified commentaries, many
others have accepted Frye’s basic premise that Blake can be
interpreted systematically and synoptically but have not them-
selves sought to pursue the implications of that premise. It is as
if, having ‘worked out’ Blake’s thought as a whole as thor-
oughly, elegantly, and compellingly as anyone could hope to do,
Frye relieved his successors of that burden and enabled them to
focus their attention instead on individual works, specific the-
matic concerns (Blake’s epistemology, his linguistic theory, his
views on female sexuality, etc.), and on subjects neglected in
Fearful Symmetry (Blake’s paintings, his career as a commercial
engraver, his involvement with radical circles, etc.).
In one respect, however, the book’s influence has been so
thorough, not only on critical commentary but on textual
scholarship, as to have become largely indiscernible. Thus
Mary Lynn Johnson observes that ‘Fearful Symmetry, obedient
to the proportions of Blake’s engraved canon, concentrates on
the longer, later, and more baffling “prophetic works”’
(p. 154). Yet the very idea of such a canon was Frye’s own.17
He justified his decision to devote the greater part of his com-
mentary to the later prophecies on the reasonable grounds that
‘they are what a great poet chose to spend most of his time on’
(p. 13), but he based his claim that ‘the engraved poems were
intended to form an exclusive and definitive canon’ (p. 14) on
a single assertion – factually inaccurate, at that – in a manu-
script poem: ‘Reengravd Time after Time / Ever in their
Youthful prime / My Designs unchangd remain’. Despite the
absence of an explicit indication from Blake that he conceived
his books in illuminated printing as a distinct body of work, let
alone as a body divisible into major and minor components,
this conception of a Blakean canon has found such widespread
acceptance that it is reproduced in the two most recent schol-
arly editions of Blake’s complete writings, G. E. Bentley Jr.’s of
1978 and David Erdman’s of 1982. Both editors distinguish the
FRYE’S FEARFUL SYMMETRY 171
etched from the letterpress and manuscript texts, giving the
etched ones pride of place at the front of their editions.
Although Erdman for his part, noting the range of variants
among copies of the same work, takes issue with Frye’s desig-
nation of an ‘exclusive and definitive’ canon, he nevertheless
regards the existence of the canon itself as self-evident. The
same view of the etched books is implicit in the Blake Trust’s
six-volume facsimile edition of The Illuminated Books of
William Blake (1991-5). Thus the Blake we encounter in these
editions, which are the best available, is a Blake mediated,
however subtly, through Fearful Symmetry.
Although it is not a comparison that Frye would have
relished, it is nonetheless true that just as it used to be almost
impossible to read Donne except through the lens of T. S.
Eliot’s criticism, so it has long been almost impossible to read
Blake except through the lenses of Frye’s criticism. Even those
who propose, not without justification, to remove those lenses
cannot deny that it was Frye who taught them that Blake was
worth reading in the first place.
University of Washington
Seattle
NOTES
1
‘William Blake’, Selected Essays, 3rd edn. (1951), p. 317.
2
‘William Blake’, in C. W. Houtchens and L. H. Houtchens
(eds.), The English Romantic Poets and Essayists, 2nd edn.
(New York, 1966), p. 21.
3
Fearful Symmetry, ed. N. Halmi (Toronto, 2004), p. 421.
This edition, vol. xiv of Frye’s Collected Works, is hereafter
cited parenthetically in the text.
4
‘The Keys to the Gates’, in The Stubborn Structure (1971),
p. 176.
5
Introduction to Selected Poetry and Prose of William Blake
(New York, 1953), p. xxiv.
6
Review in Modern Language Notes, 57 (Jan. 1949), 62.
7
Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 124. See also
Nicholas Halmi, ‘The Metaphysical Foundation of Frye’s
Monadology’, in J. Donaldson and A. Mendelson (eds.), Frye
and the Word (Toronto, 2004), pp. 97-104.
8
‘The Road of Excess’, The Stubborn Structure, p. 160; cf.
172 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
‘Expanding Eyes’, in Spiritus Mundi (Bloomington, Ind.,
1976), p. 100: ‘When I published a study of Blake in 1947, I
knew nothing of any “myth criticism” school, to which I was
told afterwards I belonged: I simply knew that I had to learn
something about mythology to understand Blake’.
9
Northrop Frye: A Biography (Toronto, 1989) (hereafter
Ayre), p. 176.
10
Northrop Frye Fonds 1988, box 22, file 1, Victoria College
Library, University of Toronto. In content chs. VII-IX of the
draft correspond to chs. VII and VIII of the published book.
11
Mary Lynn Johnson, ‘William Blake’, in F. Jordan (ed.), The
English Romantic Poets (New York, 1985), p. 155.
12
For a detailed examination of the textual evidence in Blake
of the Orc cycle, see Christopher Hobson, ‘The Myth of the
Orc Cycle’, in J. DiSalvo et al. (eds.), Blake, Politics, and
History (New York, 1998), pp. 5-36. Raymond Trousson has
established that, despite frequent assertions to the contrary,
medieval theologians, with the sole exception of Tertullian, did
not consider Prometheus a type of Christ (Le Thème de
Prométhée dans la littérature européenne, 3rd edn. (Geneva,
2001), ch. 2). Renaissance mythographers tended to associate
Prometheus with Noah and divine Providence: see D. C. Allen,
Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism in
the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1970).
13
Johnson, ‘William Blake’, p. 155; Erdman, ‘America: New
Expanses’, in D. Erdman and J. Grant (eds.), Blake: Visionary
Forms Dramatic (Princeton, 1970), pp. 112-13; Paley, Energy
and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s
Thought (Oxford, 1970), pp. 80-1; Hobson, ‘The Myth of the
Orc Cycle’, and The Chained Boy: Orc and Blake’s Idea of
Revolution (Lewisburg, Pa., 1999).
14
The Dialect of Vision: A Contrary Reading of William
Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ (Barrytown, NY, 1998), pp. 442, 424.
15
The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942-1955, ed. R. D.
Denham (Toronto, 2001), p. 121 (9 Feb. 1949).
16
This may seem an exaggeration, but compare the editorials
Frye wrote in the 1940s and 1950s for the left-wing Canadian
Forum, now reprinted in Northrop Frye on Modern Culture,
ed. J. Gorak (Toronto, 2003).
17
I owe this observation to Ian Singer.