Northrop Frye: The Critical Passion

Abstract

My essay on Frye will allow itself a fair measure of personal avowal, because I think such openness with the reader will produce a certain efficiency in communication. I shall never forget my astonishment and delight on reading the 1949 essay, Function of Criticism at the Present Time, which in turn became the Polemical Introduction to Anatomy of Criticism, and my even greater astonishment and delight at the appearance of Towards a Theory of Cultural History (1953), which eventually served as Essay I of the Anatomy, when revised and expanded. The remarkable thing about these articles was not so much their content as their assumption, namely, that criticism could at least try to become a science. This assumption was couched in the form of most general scientific orientations, in that Frye took literature in its own terms,1 to begin with, and then did not prejudicially segregate and then destroy the claims of particular minority groups within the whole commonwealth of literary life. I did not know it at the time, but Frye was then, as now, fighting for a mode of civil rights. He was then, as now, a libertarian. He first made his name writing on Blake-freedom enough, perhaps-but it has always seemed to me that his center is as much Milton as Blake. But then, to know Blake truly is to understand Milton. Before turning to the consequences of Frye's assumption that litera-