Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society by Northrop Frye

Abstract

490 NOTES 1 T.S. Eliot, "What Is Minor Poetry," On Poetry and Poets (London 1957), p 46. 2 Selected Essays (New York 1950), pp 170-71. 3 For example, in the essay "What is Minor Poetry," we find Eliot saying: "We seem, so far to have arrived at the tentative conclusion that, whatever a minor poet may be, a major poet is one the whole of whose work we ought to read, in order fully to appreciate any part of it." On Poetry and Poets, p 4 7 4 Selected Essays, p 179. 5 On Poetry and Poets, p 47. 6 Selected Essays, p 179. 7 T.S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in The Philosophy ofF.H. Bradley, edited with notes and A Selected Bibliography by Anne C. Bolgan (London 1964). See especially Eliot's concluding chapter. 8 Selected Essays, p 368. 9 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York 1971), p 322. 10 Ibid, p 322. 11 Ibid, p 427. 12 In his "Eliot and F.H. Bradley: an account," Wollheim remarks that "Eliot, in the pursuit of a certain kind of security or reassurance that we are in no position to define, was progressively led to substitute, in his mind, on the one hand, ideas of less content for ideas of more content, and, on the other hand, poorer or softer ideas for better and stronger ideas." Eliot in Perspective, ed. Graham Martin (London 1970), p 190. 13 T.S. Eliot, "In Memory of Henry James," The Egoist, 5 (January 1918J, 2. an n e c. bo lgan / University of Western Ontario Northrop Frye, Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976). xviii, 296. $11.5 0 At times I find it pleasant to entertain the perspective by incongruity of an analogy between Northrop Frye's writings since Fearful Symmetry (1947) and Robert Frost's New Hampshire. New Hampshire followed its title poem, an informal cultural-spiritual-critical topology of considerable length, with a series of separate poems called " n o tes" that develop to some length topics suggested in the title poem, these followed in turn by a set of more lyric " grace n o tes." The poem "New Hampshire" originally had literal footnotes to the "notes" and "grace notes" that followed. Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) has yet to acquire such footnotes, but every reader of Frye's writings will have a growing awareness of the elaborate relation between Frye's central anatomy of our approaches to literary study and his other books of continuous discourse ("notes") and separate essays ("grace notes"). I hope Frye, in whose writings precise musical analogy plays so large a part, might accept these informal analogues for what he has described, in Spiritus Mundi, as a "spiral curriculum, circling around the same issues, though trying to keep them open-ended" (p 100). The following pages will make clear, I trust, that these Frostian analogies are in no way reductive. 4 9 i Frye's most recent note - at the time I am writing - is The Secular Scripture (1976), to be reviewed elsewhere in e s c . His most recent gathering of grace notes is Spiritus Mundi (1976). Frye tells us in his "Preface" that this title was originally suggested for Fables of Identity (1963), implying the thematic and structural continuity of these two collections and an intervening one, The Stubborn Structure (1970). Frye, again in the "Preface," describes the basic pattern of this continuity by dividing the twelve essays that follow into three groups: "general issues related to literary criticism ... general issues within literary criticism itself ... more specific criticism of authors" (p vii). The full sub-titles of the collections of 1963, 1970, and 1976 suggest an exfoliating pattern both synchronic and diachronic or, to use Frye's less cumbersome terms, both a meaning and a narrative. The very title Spiritus Mundi provides a resonant image of the anagogic source or goal of all of Frye's writings, whatever their particular occasion or emphasis. "Part Three: four po ets" takes up single aspects of "authors who have turned up constantly in my writing" (p vii), not surprisingly Milton, Blake, Yeats, and Stevens. In four...