Frye Unschooled: Mythopoeic Modernism in Canada

Abstract

The relationship between Northrop Frye and the group of poets sometimes known as the Frye School (1) has been of enough critical interest over the last half-century to produce a significant, if fragmented, body of work on the subject. While it has not received the attention paid to earlier Canadian modernist poetry, (2) the Toronto-based mythopoeic tradition has been addressed by some of Canada's most prominent critics, who begin to note the distinctive character of this tradition in the 1950s. Appraisals of the Frye School generally fall into three camps: critics note the emergence of a mythopoeic tradition in mid-century Toronto but do not tie it directly to Frye, (3) they argue that this tradition emerges explicitly because of Frye's influence, (4) or they challenge Frye's influence as the crucial factor leading to the tradition's emergence. (5) But despite the continued interest of this topic to critics, the coeval development of Frye's archetypal criticism and the highly mythic poetic praxis of the writers grouped under the Frye School banner, a moment that marks a distinctive shift in the character of Canadian modernist poetry, has never been fully explored or adequately explained. The recent republication of many of the essays on the relationship between Frye and this group in Northrop Frye's Canadian Literary Criticism and Its Influence (2009), as well as the publication of this special issue to mark Frye's one-hundredth birthday, marks this as an appropriate moment to survey the state of critical work on mythopoeic modernism in and illuminate the significant aspects of its development that still require further inquiry. Frye protests on more than one occasion that There is no such thing as a Frye of (Frye 9), but while the term school indicates a degree of organization and close affiliation of the poets that has never existed a significant tradition of mythopoeic poetry does emerge in late-forties Toronto and gains strength during the period that Frye writes his Letters in Canada series of reviews for the University of Toronto Quarterly (1950 to 1959). For the Toronto poets, mythmaking is the central topic and technique of their poetic production from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, and it continues to interest many for the length of their careers. The list of poets associated with the Frye School varies, but Jay Macpherson, James Reaney, Douglas Le Pan, Daryl Hine, Wilfred Watson, Eli Mandel, Margaret Atwood, and D. G. Jones are most often included; Dennis Lee, Anne Wilkinson, and Gwendolyn MacEwen are occasionally counted part of the group. For most of the middle of the twentieth century, these poets are some of the most highly praised and often awarded (6) in Canadian literature, and critical overviews of the decade invariably point to the interest in myth as its defining characteristic. (7) Most critics interested in the relationship between the Toronto poets and Frye rely on a model of influence to explain the obsession with (Beattie 329) that the fifties poets share, arguing that they absorbed Frye's ideas and structures as students (8) or as suggestible readers and then spent their literary careers converting Frye's literary theory into (Brown 283). While this model has obvious attractions, it fails to situate the work of Frye and the fifties poets within their larger literary and cultural contexts and discounts the rootedness of Frye's critical work in his reading of Canadian mythopoeic poetry, some of which emerged before the publication of his major critical works. Frye's dismissal of the existence of a Frye School is both an expression of humility and a question of the label's accuracy. As either a concept or a label, I argue, it fails to account for the work of poets who were never schooled in mythopoeia by Frye and for the general modernist interest in mythography in which the Toronto poets, and Frye himself, participate. A recognition of the limitations of the idea of the Frye School as well as the creation of some more accurate alternatives are both necessary. …