“Introduction” from Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology by Northrop Frye. Copyright ©1963 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and renewed 1991 by Jane Widdicombe. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
This book is a selection of my critical essays, all but two of which were written after the completion of the Anatomy of Criticism (1957). That very theoretical book stated in its preface that a work of practical criticism was needed to complement it, and though this book is hardly the sequel that I then had in mind, there is a good deal of more specific criticism in it. The first four essays outline the theoretical assumptions on which the others are based. The first, “The Archetypes of Literature,” was one of a series published in the Kenyon Review by various critics under the general title of “My Credo.”1 I do not associate criticism with belief in quite the way that such a title implies, but the article is earlier than the Anatomy of Criticism, and is to some extent a summarized statement of the critical program worked out in that book. The next three papers are later than the Anatomy, are consistent with it, but can be read independently of it, and do not employ its elaborate apparatus. “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement”2 states my central principle about “myth criticism”: that myth is a structural element in literature because literature as a whole is a “displaced” mythology. “Nature and Homer”3 explains how revolutions in the history of literature are invariably revolutions in literary form, and therefore a reshaping of literary conventions. “New Directions from Old”4 introduces the conception of the history of imagery, and the general outline of the medieval and Renaissance world-picture. This world-picture was elaborated by the Ptolemaic universe and the chain of being, but for literary criticism it is essentially a framework for images, and I expound it as such.
The rest of the book discusses various works and authors in the central tradition of mythopoeic poetry, as outlined in the essay on Blake: a tradition in which the major and prevailing tendencies are Romantic, revolutionary, and Protestant. For the most part the critical method is the one indicated in the title of the Spenser paper5 which begins the series: an attempt to domesticate oneself in a poetic world by presenting its imagery as a structure, as the consistent and coherent environment, or imaginative home, that we enter as we begin to read. It is the method followed by Yeats in his early essay on “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry,” though I call imagery what he there calls philosophy.
The courteous reader is requested to keep in mind the fact that most of the essays in this book were originally papers read to specific audiences on specific occasions, and that the occasion sometimes forms part of the argument of the paper. The variations in their length usually go back to a chairman’s allowance of twenty, thirty, or forty minutes. “Literature as Context”6 was given at the second congress of the International Comparative Literature Association at North Carolina in 1958, and so assumes an audience interested in the theory of comparative literature. “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility”7 was read at an MLA conference in a group organized by Professor Earl Wasserman of Johns Hopkins, with the object of considering, as he put it in a note attached to the paper when it was printed in ELH, “the question of whether the literature of the later eighteenth century is merely transitional or whether it justifies and calls for a distinct kind of esthetic analysis.” “Blake after Two Centuries,”8 as the title implies, was written for the bicentenary year of Blake’s birth, 1957. “The Imaginative and the Imaginary”9 was the “Fellowship Lecture” delivered at the meeting of the American Association of Psychiatrists in Toronto in 1962, as the second sentence indicates,10 and the interests of this audience have conditioned both the direction of the argument and the choice of quotations. The essays on Byron11 and Emily Dickinson12 were introductions to selections from these poets prepared for the anthologies Major British Writers (1959) and Major Writers of America (1962), published by Harcourt, Brace & World. As general introductions aimed mainly at undergraduate readers, they include biographical sketches which can claim no originality or first-hand research.
The earliest essay in the book is the Yeats paper,13 which was written immediately after Fearful Symmetry was published in 1947. It was thus written before most of the major scholarly interpretations of Yeats had appeared, and though I repudiate nothing in it, I should write it very differently now. The essay on the Shakespeare sonnets14 was contributed to a book which also printed the sonnets, to the great relief of the conscientious reader: I am sorry that it is hardly practicable to reprint here all the sonnets I refer to by number. Similarly, the Stevens essay15 is so close to the text of the Collected Poems and The Necessary Angel (not the Opus Posthumous, which appeared later than the essay) that it is hardly independent of them, though I think it should be a rewarding essay if read as it is intended to be read.
I am pleased to find that, in spite of the variety of occasions and audiences, the present collection makes a unified book that can be read through from beginning to end, if the reader so desires. There is some repetition, but most of it connects the theoretical and the practical parts of the book, so is too functional to be removed. The hinge of the total argument, I suppose, is my conception of Romanticism. The Romantic movement in English literature seems to me now to be a small part of one of the most decisive changes in the history of culture, so decisive as to make everything that has been written since post-Romantic, including, of course, everything that is regarded by its producers as anti-Romantic. One feature of this change that particularly interests me is the way in which the forms of human civilization come to be regarded as man-made rather than as God-made. Some comments on this may be found in the “Imaginative and the Imaginary” paper, which I place where it is because its centre of gravity falls in the Romantic period. This aspect of the change gives a peculiar significance to two poets of that period, Blake and Byron. Blake raises most insistently the question of the reality of the poetic vision, a reality which is neither subjective nor objective, but is brought into being through creation itself. Byron raises most insistently the tragic situation of the artist that results when he moves into the centre of civilization, the centre being always the most isolated place. Of the four modern authors dealt with here, two, Stevens and Emily Dickinson, represent particularly the Blakean preoccupation with the reality of what is created. The other two, Joyce and Yeats, are more in the Byronic tradition, more concerned with the problem of the poete maudit and with what Finnegans Wake might well have called, and doubtless does call somewhere, the curse of ham. I deal with both largely in connection with Blake, but the difference in their more rhetorical centre of gravity is clear enough even so.
Finally, the book is dedicated to E.J. Pratt, not merely for a great number of personal reasons, but as a contemporary poet who belongs centrally to the tradition dealt with here, and whose poetry helps, in a peculiarly vivid and immediate way, to make it more intelligible. My title comes from two phrases in his poem Towards the Last Spike (ll. 7, 38).16