Frye’s preface mentions each of the sixteen essays in The Stubborn Structure, but the information he provides is often quite minimal. Full bibliographic data for each piece can be found in the endnotes. Originally published in The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1970; London: Methuen, 1970), vii–x. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Books.
This book is a collection of essays and lectures, composed at intervals between 1962 and 1968. I have arranged them not chronologically but thematically, starting with a theoretical group, dealing mainly with the contexts of literary criticism, and following them with more specific studies in English literature, in roughly historical sequence. I hope, and think, that the reader will be able to read them as chapters in a continuous argument, forming a book with a unity of its own. The local allusions are mainly American, because the United States was the milieu of most of the writing. The papers were also written, for the most part, before the rise of what is called student unrest, and while I have also written and spoken a good deal about the latter, I am dealing here with the permanent issues which have been ruffled but not altered by it.
Ever since Cicero it has been assumed that the humanist should also be a professional rhetorician, ready to make speeches on a great variety of occasions and subjects. Of the essays which follow, not one was written purely from my own initiative: every one was suggested to me by someone organizing a conference or program or book, and the great majority of them were at first delivered orally. Of course, the writing of themes on assigned topics has also been traditionally a part of a humanist’s training. But a time when every university has projects and programs for visiting lecturers, and when the universities themselves are connected by jet planes, puts the humanist under something of a strain. The strain is not in the visit but in producing the manuscript: at that point he is in much the position of the old-style comedians who used to be able to tour the country with one act, until the coming of television exhausted their life’s stock of routines in a night or two. What makes publication difficult is precisely what makes oral delivery practicable. In oral delivery there must be a great deal of repetition, because each audience needs its own set of clues: an audience in Chicago has not heard the lecture in Texas which a week previously made some of the same points. When the lectures are published, even separately, such self-cribbing has to be removed: a process at once unrewarding, tedious, and in an irrational way somewhat embarrassing. I have tried to minimize all repetition, and hope that what remains will be more helpful than distracting. Sometimes, of course, repetition can be a sign not so much of lack of ideas as of conviction, even of some consistency about one’s convictions.
Each essay, then, was written for a specific occasion: I have not attempted to remove all the marks of those occasions, and I disagree profoundly with the convention which says that I should. Here again I appeal to the humanist tradition: Cicero would have been an idiot to revise his defence of Archias into an essay on the place of the poet in society. Still, a word or two about what the occasions were may be helpful to the reader.
The first three essays were contributed to conferences organized by different universities, usually in connection with anniversary celebrations, on general themes. The universities were, respectively, Chicago, Cornell, and Kentucky, and the questions to be dealt with were, respectively: what knowledge is most worth having? what kind of morality is relevant to scholarship? and, what do the humanities provide that is not provided by the sciences? These questions are referred to in the opening sentences of each paper.1 All three are concerned to ask the question lucidly rather than to answer it magisterially, and they attempt to be clear enough for the reader to see the gaps in their arguments. The discussion of the informing power of words in “Speculation and Concern” is particularly tentative, partly because I have not seen the issue raised elsewhere. The essay on design in the arts2 changes the main context from other verbal structures to other arts: except for this change of context, the argument is not especially new. An earlier version of it was given at a festival on the arts at the University of Rochester: the present version appeared in a Festschrift for my friend Philip Wheelwright,3 as a tribute to his versatility of interests.
The next three papers deal with the theory of criticism chiefly in the context of teaching. The attack in the “Polemical Introduction” of my Anatomy of Criticism on the notion that criticism is primarily the evaluation of literature seems to have been a hard pill to swallow. “On Value-Judgments,” a paper given at an MLA conference in Chicago, is one of many efforts I have made to explain my position on this. The most frequent question asked me is: “But aren’t you assuming a value-judgment when you spend more time writing about Shakespeare or Milton than about other poets?” This question was answered in the Anatomy of Criticism itself, but I was recently asked it six times in succession by a group of students at a college I was visiting. “On Value-Judgments”4 tries to answer it again, and tries also to show that at a certain point the pseudo-question of evaluation passes into the genuine question of the values of literary study itself. “Criticism, Visible and Invisible” suggests what those values are: this was an address given at Trinity College, Hartford, the occasion a conference on my own critical methods, organized by the late Professor Frederick Gwynne.5 The final paper in this first section6 was a speech at another MLA meeting, addressed to an audience interested in the sequence and interconnection in the teaching of English from kindergarten to graduate school.
Of the essays in the second group, the one on Utopias formed part of a special issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, devoted to that theme.7 I confined myself to the literary aspect of Utopias because the political, philosophical, and other aspects were being taken care of more competently by other contributors. I place it first in the second section as a counterpart to the opening essay, with which it has much in common. The Milton essay,8 given at a tercentenary conference on Paradise Lost at the University of Western Ontario, is a kind of distillation of some earlier lectures of mine on Milton also given on that campus, published as The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics (I give the subtitle because for some reason this is the only title of the British edition). The two Blake essays differ widely in their interests: the first one,9 given at the University of Nebraska, tries to outline some of the connections between my own theory of criticism and the study of Blake in which it began; the second10 is intended simply as an introductory guide to the symbolism of the Prophecies, and hence, perhaps, as an epitome of the long and difficult Fearful Symmetry. The Romanticism paper11 was the opening one of a series of four “reconsiderations” of Romanticism given to the English Institute in 1962; the view of Romanticism taken in it I have since developed in a later book, A Study of English Romanticism, where it is applied to Beddoes, Shelley, and Keats.
Of the two Victorian papers, the one on Dickens12 was also given at the English Institute, in 1967: it is based on a conception of New Comedy which I had outlined elsewhere,13 but had never applied to Dickens in detail. The other paper,14 given at Rice University, was reprinted in a Festschrift for my late colleague Professor A.S.P. Woodhouse: the academic field it covers was one of particular interest to him. The Yeats paper,15 delivered at the Sligo conference on Yeats in 1968, is my third effort, which by folk-tale convention ought to be the most successful one, to reconcile Yeats’s imagery as a whole with the scheme of A Vision. It and the Milton paper are preliminary studies for what I am afraid will become a long and intricate book on patterns of imagery in literature.16
The Literary History of Canada was a co-operative project, under the general editorship of Professor Carl Klinck of Western Ontario, and embracing about thirty-five contributors. I was asked to write a conclusion17 trying to sum up what the book as a whole was saying about the poetic imagination as it operated in Canada. I have edited the text, for the comfort of the reader who wants to read it independently of its context, and have eliminated my specific references to my colleagues; but anyone who looks up the original essay can see for himself how much I owe to them, not only in facts and ideas, but in phrasing. I hope that the reader unfamiliar with Canadian literature will read it, not as a quaint and provincial appendix to the present book, but as a glimpse of a new imaginative landscape which is still relevant to his own.
The title is from a passage in Blake’s Jerusalem (Plate 36 or 40, depending on which copy is used as the basis of the edition), which has always meant a great deal to me, and which looms up with a peculiar power and resonance even in that tremendous setting:
I call them by their English names: English, the rough basement.
Los built the stubborn structure of the Language, acting against
Albion’s melancholy, who must else have been a Dumb despair.
And, as some of those who write about me are still asserting that I ignore the social reference of literary criticism, the subtitle calls the attention of those who read me to the fact that I have written about practically nothing else.