1 Two were published in England (nos. 3 and 21), while seven could be considered Canadian—two of these, however (nos. 18 and 26), being speeches delivered in Canada that remained unpublished until they appeared in collections edited in the U.S. by Robert D. Denham.
2 David Lodge, “Current Critical Theory,” Critical Quarterly, 9 (Spring 1967): 84.
3 The first ed. of the booklet sold out by 1968 and the second ed. was printed in 10,000 copies, bringing the total printed to 30,000 copies (see memorandum in NFF, 1988, box 60, file 7). The MLA is the major learned society in the United States concerned with language and literature studies. NF was an active member, participating in its conventions and publications, and serving as vice-president (1975) and president (1976), the first Canadian to occupy that position.
4 Relations of Literary Study: Essays on Interdisciplinary Study, ed. James Thorpe (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1967), xi, xiv.
5 NF’s article is specifically singled out in the introduction in this regard. See The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry, ed. Stephen Spender and Donald Hall, 2nd ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1970), unnumbered p. [x].
6 Kenneth Rothwell, “Programmed Learning: A Back Door to Empiricism in English Studies,” College English, 23, no. 4 (January 1962): 248. College English is issued by the National Council of Teachers of English; the conference, held at Trinity College, Hartford, was sponsored jointly by the New England College English Association and the Connecticut Council of Teachers of English.
7 Murray Krieger, ed., Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism: Selected Papers from the English Institute (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 1. Subsequent references to this volume are in parentheses in the text.
8 For further discussion of these critiques, see Germaine Warkentin’s Introduction to EICT, xlv–xlvii.
9 The Shakespearean essays include the often-reprinted “Argument of Comedy” (1948), “Comic Myth in Shakespeare” (1952), “Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy” (1953), “Shakespeare’s Experimental Comedy” (on Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1961), and “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale” (1962). The lectures that were to form NP (on Shakespearean comedy and romance, 1965) had been given in November 1963.
10 NF’s own early attempts at fiction were in a satiric vein; in FS he remarks of his mentor, Blake, that “one may wonder whether satire was not his real medium, whether in the long run he was not of the race of Rabelais and Apuleius” (193/195)—the two latter also favourites of NF’s. For the 1944 essay “The Nature of Satire,” see EICT, 39–57.
11 Cf. the complaint against the manual quoted in the headnote to no. 28.
12 See, e.g., an interview of December 1968, in which NF says of the humanities as contrasted with the sciences, “I would call these subjects which deal with the world that man is trying to build, rather than the world that man lives in, the concerned subjects, the mythological subjects…. Literature is at the centre, and then around it come religion and very large areas of history and political theory and psychology and philosophy and so on” (INF, 170).
13 John Ayre relates that Karl Miller, who managed the Beacon Press paperbacks in Boston, put NF on his editorial board to tap his knowledge. “As a result, Frye managed to make accessible such ostensibly unpromising items as … Gaston Bachelard’s The Psychonanlysis of Fire” (Northrop Frye: a Biography [Toronto: Random House, 1989], 278).
14 For an interesting discussion of similarities and differences between Jung, Eliade, Campbell, and Frye as mythographers, see Glen Gill, Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).
15 There is an annotated copy of the 1949 ed. in NFL, though we cannot be sure when it was annotated.
16 Interview with Laura Innocenti (1987), INF, 827.
17 For social vision as the end of education, see EICT, 492–4; WE, 94, 104–5, 175, 190.
18 See pp. 235–6. This approach was already being questioned by Comparative Literature specialists during the 1964 congress on “Source and Influence” (see no. 24, n. 6), and was to be attacked definitively by René Wellek in 1970 (for which see p. xxxv).
19 Otherwise known as the Seattle epiphany. See TBN, li, for an explanation; a number of other references are gathered in LN, 728n. 24.
20 See George Levine, “Our Culture and Our Convictions,” Partisan Review, 39, no. 1 (1972): 63–79, a consideration of three works which respond to the student questioning of traditional liberalism; and Robert Gorham Davis, “The Problematic State of Literature,” New Leader, 54 (17 May 1971): 7–8.
21 It is so taken by Graham Good in his Humanism Betrayed: Theory, Ideology, and Culture in the Contemporary University (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), where NF’s position is contrasted with that of the poststructuralist theory that has taken over the university. NF seems to have sometimes thought of CP as “my humanism essay” (RT, 109; cf. 113–15).
22 Bordeaux, 1970; published in the Proceedings (Stuttgart: Bieber, 1976).
23 TBN, 217; cf. the remark that it may be a vade mecum through the present confusion, “a small unpretentious book of some sanity & sequence” (TBN, 270).
24 NF in fact later regretted his choice of terminology: “I’m not entirely happy with the phrase ‘myth of’ any more…. I realized that that was not really a proper description of what I was talking about. I wouldn’t, I think, use the phrase ‘myth of concern’ now. I would speak more of concern expressing itself in myths.” David Cayley, Northrop Frye in Conversation (Concord, Ont.: Anansi, 1992), 113–14; INF, 966.
25 “Literature as Context: Milton’s Lycidas,” M&B, 34.
26 Fletcher maintained that “the archetypes themselves are ‘canonical’”; “Northrop Frye: The Critical Passion,” Critical Inquiry, 1, no. 4 (June 1975): 746.
1 The talk at Cornell on 18 April 1968 is entitled “The Social Context of Literary Criticism,” which is the subtitle of CP. It is printed in LS, 347–65; in the headnote Robert D. Denham notes that talks with the same title were given at Ithaca College on 30 October 1969 and at Wells College on 1 November 1969. For the very similar “Mythos and Logos,” see the summary at no. 19.
2 “The Ethics of Change: The Role of the University” (7 November 1968) and “The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract” (9 December 1968); rpt. in WE, 345–78.
3 “Communications,” The Listener, 84 (9 July 1970): 33–5; rpt. in NFMC, 134–9.
4 The paper NF gave at the 1969 congress of the International Federation of Modern Languages and Literatures/Fédération internationale des langues et littératures modernes in Islamabad, Pakistan, “Tradition and Change in the Theory of Criticism,” is published in LS, 243–52. The congress was an intense and memorable occasion. The Pakistani organizers provided their international guests with a week of excursions to Lahore and Rawalpindi, to typical villages, to archaeological and religious sites, and to the Khyber Pass on the Afghan border, where participants were hosted by a local tribe. NF fully participated in this tour and in the following week of paper sessions and discussions.
5 So most translations, though Kant’s word is Weg [way], not Pfad [path]. [NF] Kant says that “As regards those who wish to pursue a scientific method, they have now the choice of following either the dogmatical or the sceptical, while they are bound never to desert the systematic mode of procedure. When I mention, in relation to the former, the celebrated Wolf, and as regards the latter, David Hume, I may leave, in accordance with my present intention, all others unnamed. The critical path alone is still open” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn [London: Dent; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1934], 483; copy in NFL). In the German original, the phrase is: “Der kritische Weg ist allein noch offen.”
6 For an opposed view, see F.E. Sparshott, The Structure of Aesthetics (Toronto, 1963). [NF]
7 See Encyklopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften (Leipzig, 1877), especially the opening chapter, “Die Idee der Philologie.” [NF]
8 Sir Walter Raleigh, Milton (London: Edward Arnold, 1922), 88.
9 Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934). [NF]
10 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1949), 18 (pt. 1, chap. 1).
11 Richard Rolle describes the bee’s ballast in his short essay “The Bee.” He actually uses the figure to describe righteous men: “They take earth; that is, they hold themselves vile and earthly, that they be not blown about with the wind of vanity and of pride.” Selected Works of Richard Rolle, Hermit, ed. G.C. Heseltine (London: Longmans, Green, 1930), 103. A copy is in NFL.
12 Eliot famously declared that he was Classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion (“Preface,” For Lancelot Andrewes [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929], vii). In TSE, NF suggests that Eliot was thus taking a side in the English civil war of the seventeenth century, which to Eliot contained in embryo all the disintegrating tendencies of modern times (19). On p. 7, above, he refers to Jacques Maritain, who came regularly to teach at the University of Toronto, as an upholder of the Thomist synthesis. Elsewhere NF calls the conservative theory of decline the “butterslide” theory of history.
13 The reference is to Blake’s increasing annoyance with his patron William Hayley, who had set him up in seclusion at Felpham, but whom Blake came to suspect of trying to pervert his genius into socially acceptable channels. At this time Blake was also accused of treason by a drunken soldier named Schofield whom he ejected from his garden, and sometimes he suspected that Hayley was behind the incident. As NF explains in FS, the quarrel forms part of the autobiographical background of Milton, in which Hayley is portrayed as Satan.
14 NF credits American New Criticism with having emancipated criticism from remains of nineteenth-century philological practices, and turned its attention to the literary text. But he faults it with losing sight of the main goal by focusing on detailed textual explication instead of tracing relationships with the total body of literature. He avoids, here and elsewhere (except perhaps when he quotes Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire, cf. no. 4 above) allusions to Continental Nouvelle Critique, which in so many ways participated in freeing criticism from any extraliterary causation. But when, for example, Lucien Goldmann identifies sociological patterns in the literary work; when Tzvetan Todorov visualizes linguistic patterns in it; when Georges Poulet pursues in it the theme of time and Charles Mauron explores its hidden psychological data, their intratextual research still seems to fail in the main task of criticism as NF sees it. This may explain his near-silence on the entire Nouvelle Critique movement.
15 This is the theme of much of The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), esp. pp. 84–166.
16 Leo Spitzer (1887–1960), linguist and critic, author of numerous books and articles on literature, style, and syntax.
17 “We shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his [the poet’s] works may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), 14.
18 New Critic John Crowe Ransom argued that structure, or the argument of a poem, is necessary but not so valuable as the texture, or rich local values and irrelevancies, which give a kind of knowledge not offered by science. See, e.g., The New Criticism (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941), esp. 219–20.
19 “Between the conception / And the creation / Between the emotion / And the response / Falls the Shadow” (The Hollow Men, sec. 5, ll. 11–15). Eliot is speaking in general of the incompleteness of human experience.
20 Blake, Letter to William Hayley (6 May 1800), E705.
21 I have used these already in a different context in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), 35 [AC2, 33]. [NF] Schiller’s essay is Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795–96).
22 Philip Massinger (1583–1640), author of some fifty-five plays, was popular in the eighteenth century. The Oxford Companion to English Literature (rev. ed., 1998) comments on “the present comparative neglect of one of the most serious professional dramatists of the post-Shakespearian period.”
23 Eliot, Burnt Norton, sec. 2, ll. 1–2.
24 “Tching prayed on the mountain and / wrote MAKE IT NEW / on his bath tub / Day by Day make it new / cut underbrush, / pile the logs / keep it growing” (Canto 53, ll. 51–7). Pound translated Confucius’s The Unwobbling Pivot. His introductory note reads, “THE UNWOBBLING PIVOT, contains what is usually supposed not to exist, namely the Confucian metaphysics.” See Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects, trans. Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1969), 95.
25 For these frequently used terms in Hopkins, see, e.g., Letter to Robert Bridges, 15 February 1879, in A Hopkins Reader, rev. and enlarged, ed. John Pick (New York: Image, 1966), 149–50; also 46, 11, 210. See also n. 58, below.
26 For the timeless moments that are a major theme in Four Quartets, see for instance Little Gidding, sec. 5, ll. 21–2, and next note.
27 “But to apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time, is an occupation for the saint— / No occupation either, but something given / And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.” The Dry Salvages, sec. 5, ll. 17–23.
28 Milton, “Of Education,” in The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 4:277.
29 Scienza Nuova, etc., translated as The New Science of Giambattista Vico, by T[homas] G. Bergin and M[ax] H. Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1948, rev. 1968). See especially bk. 2, “Poetic Wisdom.” [NF]
30 See Ezra Pound, “Date Line,” in Literary Essays [of Ezra Pound], ed. T.S. Eliot [(New York: New Directions, 1935)], 77. [NF] The Greek paideuma can mean “lesson”; when mythologies coalesce with specific cultures, myths can assume educational functions, and be seen as lessons.
31 Tillich’s definition of religion as “ultimate concern” appears throughout his work. See, e.g., Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper, 1957), 1–4, 62; and Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951–63), 1:211–15.
32 For Polonius haranguing Laertes, see Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.3.59–80; for Johnson’s condemnation of Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son (written 1732–68), see James Boswell, Life of Johnson, in Life of Johnson, together with Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. and enl. L.F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 1:266.
33 See R.H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament ([Oxford: Clarendon Press,] 1913), 2: 715 ff. [NF]
34 I have been particularly indebted to Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (1960); E.A. Havelock, A Preface to Plato (1963); Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (1967). [NF]
35 Bacon thus described the intent of his Essays in the dedication to the revised and enlarged edition of 1625.
36 Of course by this phrase I do not mean simply a culture that uses writing for legal, commercial, or religious purposes, but one that publicly and habitually uses writing for its imaginative and intellectual expression. Cf. Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (1951), chap. 2. [NF]
37 See the opening of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
38 More accurately, the Duke of Gloucester [the future Richard III] in 3 Henry VI, 5.6.[82.] [NF]
39 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations, bk. 11, sec. 3. The editor of the Penguin edition notes: “If these words are authentic and not a later insertion, they are the only reference which Marcus makes to the Christians. C.R. Haines, however, in the Loeb edition of the Meditations, points out that the clause is ‘outside the construction, and in fact ungrammatical. It is in the very form of a marginal note, and has every appearance of being a gloss foisted into the text.’” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, ed. Maxwell Staniforth (New York: Penguin, 1964), 166.
40 See particularly chap. 1 of Culture and Anarchy, in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 416–23. Here Arnold notes the want of “sweetness and light” in middle-class liberalism and Protestantism, with its emphasis on moral perfection. See also the last chapter, “Hebraism and Hellenism,” which stresses English Hebraism (474).
41 Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), colleague of Lenin and active theorist of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, was ousted from the Communist Party in 1927 by Stalin, exiled, and eventually assassinated in Mexico. Liu Shao-chi (1895–1969) was a colleague and rival of Chairman Mao; criticized, for instance, for believing in a common human nature and denying the class-bound character of art, he was expelled from the party in 1968.
42 See Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service, ll. 5–8: “In the beginning was the Word. / Superfetation of τò,έv / And at the mensual turn of time, / Produced enervate Origen.”
43 Yeats, A Dialogue of Self and Soul, l. 24.
44 De Rerum Natura, 1.63 ff. [NF]
45 Defensor Pacis is usually ascribed to Marsilio Dei Mainardini, often listed as Marsilius of Padua (ca. 1275–ca. 1342). In 1326 papal condemnation of the work as subversive of existing institutions—i.e., the church—forced Marsilius into exile in Nuremberg. For his condemnation of the Pope’s claim of universal secular jurisdiction, and of the Roman bishops’ usurpation of the civil laws by their own courts, see Defensor Pacis, trans. Alan Gewirth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 361.
46 In the last chapter of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon famously summed up his achievement by saying that he had described the triumph of barbarism and religion.
47 Arthur Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1974), argues that, although Stephen Gosson is often labelled a Puritan, this is an “uninformed oversimplification” (24n. 64), and that in major ways “Gosson’s ideas are radically opposed to the basic outlook of the most popular and influential Puritans of his day” (26–8). William Ringler, Stephen Gosson: A Biographical and Critical Study (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942) likewise maintains that the arguments of the Schoole of Abuse are “remarkable for their essential temperance and reasonableness” and that Gosson attacks abuses, not the art themselves (65–6).
48 Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West, l. 55.
49 See Plutarch’s Moralia, sec. 17, “The Obsolescence of the Oracles,” in which the helmsman of a ship is told to call out, “Great Pan is dead,” and a great cry of lamentation is heard from the land.
50 Yeats uses this phrase both as the title for a collection of poems (1935) and in his play Resurrection (The Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats [London: MacMillan, 1953], 586). In A Vision: A Reissue with the Author’s Final Revisions (New York: Macmillan, 1956), he points out that Caesar was killed on the 15th of March and that “Christ rose from the dead at a full moon in the first month of the year [March]” (245, 250). In his copy of this ed. in NFL, NF wrote in the margin opposite the latter, “and, presumably, was conceived at roughly the same time.”
51 The grammarian, living shortly after the revival of learning in Europe, dedicated himself to knowledge. Browning is affectionately satirical: “He settled Hoti’s business—let it be!— / Properly based Oun— / Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De, / Dead from the waist down” (ll. 129–32). A note in the Complete Works of Robert Browning, ed. John C. Berkey et al. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969–) gives the meaning of these Greek words: “
as a conjunction meaning ‘that’ or ‘because’; Oνύ means ‘then’ in the sense of ‘therefore’; and Δε means ‘towards.’” The editors go on to say that “B[rowning] was asked to explain this passage more than once. He wrote to Tennyson in 1863: ‘I wanted the grammarian … to spend his last breath on the biggest of littleness’” (4:414). To celebrate the man’s high reach—“Let me know all!”—Browning has him buried on a mountain top.
52 Sprezzatura is a crucial concept in The Book of the Courtier; it means grace, naturalness, lack of affectation, in every aspect of conduct and every activity: “If I well remember, Count,” says Cesare Gonzaga, “it seems to me you have repeated several times this evening that the Courtier must accompany his actions, his gestures, his habits, in short, his every movement, with grace.” Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Singleton, ed. Daniel Javitch (New York and London: Norton, 2002), 30.
53 It is because of the reputed obscurity and complication of his language that in English his name has come to be associated with the word “dunce.”
54 The passage from Roger Ascham is in The Scholemaster, bk. 2 (English Works, ed. [William Aldis] Wright [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], 1904, 265–6) and from Milton in Familiar Letters, no. 8 [to Benedetto Bonmattei, ed. Donald Lemen Clark], trans. David Masson [Works of John Milton, 12:33]. [NF] NF has modernized Ascham’s spelling and punctuation.
55 As stated by NF on p. 37, above, the occasion of Sidney’s Defence of Poetry was to refute Stephen Gosson’s The Schoole of Abuse (1579). Most of Gosson’s arguments against poetry were drawn from Plato.
56 Fasti, 6.5. [NF]
57 “Poetry is the companion of the campes”: Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie (1595; also known as The Defence of Poesie), in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Smith (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 1:88. Subsequent references to this essay in vol. 1 are in square brackets in the text. A copy of Smith’s edition is in NFL. NF has modernized the Elizabethan spelling.
58 Letter to Alexander Baillie, 14 January 1883 [in A Hopkins Reader, 177–8]. [NF]
59 From “Conclusion” to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism ([London: Faber & Faber,] 1933), 151. [NF]
60 Spectator, 29 (3 April 1711): 2.
61 Dryden, Of Dramatick Poesy, an Essay (1668), in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W.P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 1:44.
62 See Lewis’s The Dithyrambic Spectator, published with The Diabolical Principle (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931).
63 Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843) consist of two parts, the first containing the writings of “A,” an aesthete and sensualist, and the second a rebuttal and defence of marriage and the ethical by “B,” Judge Vilhelm. In A’s essay on the musical erotic, Mozart’s Don Giovanni features as the culminating stage. See Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, abridged and trans. Alastair Hannay (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), esp. 102, 133–4.
64 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, l. 297.
65 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, ed. Donald A. Stauffer (New York: Modern Library, 1951), 266 (chap. 14).
66 In his Conclusiones, Philosophicae, Cabalisticae et Theologicae, posthumously published in 1495.
67 See for example Richard Hofstader, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944). [NF]
68 Eliot, The Dry Salvages, sec. 2, ll. 39–41: “development: the latter a partial fallacy / Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution, / Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.”
69 In 1912, Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward announced that they had found the fossilized bones of this prehistoric “Piltdown Man” in an English gravel pit. The fossils were not exposed as unequivocally fraudulent until 1953. As NF notes, Piltdown Man confirmed the evolutionary theories of the day: Arthur Smith Woodward argued that the combination of human and ape features had been “long previously anticipated as an almost necessary stage in the course of human evolution.” Charles Blinderman, The Piltdown Inquest (Buffalo, N.Y. : Prometheus Books, 1986), 23.
70 “A Neanderthal Man was thick-skulled and heavy-boned, he stooped forward and could not hold his head as erect as living men do, he was chinless and perhaps incapable of speech, he was very thick-set, he was, indeed, not quite one of our present species, but his brain-case was at least as large as ours and there can be no dispute about his inclusion in the genus Homo.” H.G. Wells, The Outline of History (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 63.
71 G.K. Chesterton, Chaucer, in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, ed. George Marlin and Lawrence J. Clipper (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 18:174.
72 For NF’s elaboration of the paradox that progress assumes the superiority of dynamic change, yet can only lead to a stultifying state of rest, see MC, 33 (NFMC, 17).
73 In his Rede lecture Sir Charles P. Snow contrasted the reactionary humanists with the scientists who had the future in their bones. See The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 11.
74 In chap. 2 of The Two Cultures Snow argues that “intellectuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites” (23) who want nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution. The original Luddites were nineteenth-century English labourers who smashed newly introduced machinery.
75 See Apologie for Poetrie, 178: “I neuer heard the olde song of Percy and Duglas that I found not my heart mooued more then with a Trumpet.”
76 It is actually in an essay that Lawrence speculates amusingly about what he can possibly say to a group asking him for a letter of encouragement in the battle of life: “My dear young people: I daren’t advise you to do as I do, for it’s no fun, writing books. And I won’t advise you, for your own sakes, to do as I say. For in details I’m sure I’m wrong. My dear young people, perhaps I need your encouragement more than you need mine.” D.H. Lawrence, “Accumulated Mail,” in Selected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), 292.
77 Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922).
78 Jerusalem, pl. 15 [ll. 18–19, E159]. [NF]
79 For NF’s comments on the allusions to Galileo in Paradise Lost, see RE, where he remarks that though they are not hostile, “they are curiously deprecatory. Milton seems to regard Galileo, most inaccurately, as concerned primarily with the question of whether the heavenly bodies, more particularly the moon, are habitable—as a pioneer of science fiction rather than of science” (M&B, 74). See also pp. 340–2, above.
80 Notes to Queen Mab, in The Poems of Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), 801.
81 Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (London: A.C. Fitfield, 1910), 39–41.
82 Peacock, The Four Ages of Poetry, in “A Defence of Poetry” [by] Percy Bysshe Shelley; “The Four Ages of Poetry” [by] Thomas Love Peacock, ed. John E. Jordan (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 18.
83 Ibid., 17. The crab allusion is from Hamlet, 2.2.206.
84 Ibid., 19.
85 Shelley distinguishes the principles of synthesis and analysis on p. 26 of A Defence of Poetry, in “A Defence of Poetry” [by] Percy Bysshe Shelley; “The Four Ages of Poetry” [by] Thomas Love Peacock. Future page references to this ed. are in brackets in the text.
86 See p. 9.
87 Wallace Stevens, A Primitive Like an Orb, l. 1.
88 “Didactic poetry is my abhorrence,” Preface to Prometheus Unbound, in The Poems of Shelley, 207.
89 For Arnold’s notion that culture “seeks to … make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere,” see Culture and Anarchy, in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, 426. In his essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865) Arnold first introduced the term “the best that is known and thought,” ascribing the task of propagating it to criticism (ibid., 245, 256). In chap. 2 of Tom Sawyer, Tom gets other boys to whitewash the fence, a job he has been assigned, by pretending it’s a privilege he does not want to give up. Thus he learns “that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, ed. John G. Gerber, Paul Baender, and Terry Firkins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 50.
90 William Morris, News from Nowhere; or, An Epoch of Rest (London: Longmans, Green, 1935), 227 (chap. 29). In his copy of this ed. in NFL, NF has written in the margin, “preservation of tradition.”
91 In his book Creative Evolution (1907) French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) argued that evolution was impelled by an élan vital that warred against entropy. British psychologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan (1852–1936), in his book Emergent Evolution (1923) and elsewhere, distinguished three rising levels of consciousness: the percipient, the perceptive, and the reflective. He studied this mental evolution partly by probing the boundary between instinct and intelligence in animals.
92 The Rest of the Chapters of the Book of Esther, 13:4, in the Apocrypha.
93 J.W. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, had written The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined (1862–79), a five-volume work which cast doubt on the authorship and historical accuracy of these parts of the Bible. For Arnold’s belief that it is not always wise to address advanced, unedifying truths to the uneducated, see his “The Bishop and the Philosopher,” in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77), 3:44.
94 “And I would have thee know, Sancho, that if [Truth] were to appear before the Princes, in its native Simplicity, and disrobed of the odious Disguise of Flattery, we should see happier Days; this Age would be chang’d into an Age of Gold, and former times compared to this, would be call’d the Iron Age.” Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Peter Motteux, revised by John Ozell (New York: Modern Library, 1930), 457 (bk. 2, chap. 2). In his copy of this ed. in NFL, NF has bracketed this sentence, with the note “same pattern: wonderful irony.”
95 Browne’s remark on faith occurs in pt. 1, sec. 9 of Religio Medici; his discussion of the ark, which alludes to some of the practical problems though not specifically to sanitation, occurs in pt. 1, sec. 22. See Religio Medici (London: Dent, 1906), 10, 26–7. In the margin of the former passage in his copy in NFL, NF has written “White-Queen [Protsm.]”
96 “Some believe the better for seeing CHRIST’S Sepulchre; and, when they have seen the Red Sea, doubt not of the miracle. Now, contrarily, I bless my self and am thankful that I lived not in the days of Miracles, that I never saw CHRIST nor His Disciples.” Religio Medici, 18 (pt. 1, sec. 9).
97 1 Corinthians 2:14: “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God … because they are spiritually discerned.”
98 See n. 57, above.
99 NF is alluding to Arnold’s assertion that “The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.” According to Arnold, “Our religion has materialised itself in the fact … and now the fact is failing it,” whereas for poetry “the idea is everything,” so that in the future “most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.” “The Study of Poetry,” in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, 306.
100 Quoted in his obituary in the New York Times, 3 February 1970.
101 This rhetorical appeal against the gold standard at the Democratic convention of 1896 is credited with winning for then congressman William Jennings Bryan the nomination as Democratic presidential candidate.
102 Marriage with one’s deceased wife’s sister had been illegal in England since 1835. A “Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill” was introduced into Parliament almost every year from 1846 on to permit the practice, until finally accepted in 1907. In Culture and Anarchy (1869) Arnold makes the bill a symbol of the mindless worship of “doing what one likes.”
103 “A German scholar hypothesized that there once existed a source document for Matthew and Luke. He referred to it as Quelle, which means ‘source’ in German. The abbreviation Q was adopted from this word. According to the hypothesis, someone wrote at Jerusalem in Aramaic a collection of Sayings of Jesus, and of stories which recalled some of the circumstances of the Sayings. Two editors—the editor of Matthew as we read it now, and the editor of Luke, as it was put out in the first edition, older than Luke as we read it now—took this Q as the written authority from which they could copy down authentic accounts”. J.M.C. Crum, The Original Jerusalem Gospel: Being Essays on the Document Q (London: Constable, 1927), 1.
104 For NF’s probable source in the linkage of Gnosticism and Mahayana Buddhism, see his discussion of Joseph Campbell, p. 144.
105 Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1968) gives the definitions for 
and 
respectively, as “necessity,” “destiny” or “one’s portion in life,” and “fixed by fate.” NF’s comments on the meaning of ananke in the conclusion of FS are relevant here: “It is impossible that a Greek tragedian can have meant by ananke what the average English reader means by ‘necessity’…. The meaning of ananke must be sought in the meaning of the poetic form in which it is found, in the raison d’être of Greek tragedy” (427/413–14).
106 John Milton, Areopagitica, in The Works of John Milton, 4:315. (Milton has “then” for “than.”)
107 French writer Louis-Fernand Destouches (1894–1961), who wrote under the name of Céline, was innovative in his use of slang and vulgarities and his fragmentation of narrative. NF may be alluding to his anti-Semitism (as seen in books such as L’École des cadavres [1938]), or more generally to his misanthropy, despair, and nihilism. In an interview NF commented on “the anarchistic, or perverse, or muddle-headed type of culture being promulgated by people like, say, Céline, who are quite able and significant writers and yet at the same time are simply bloody-minded kooks” (INF, 151–2).
108 Blake, Laocoön Aphorisms, E274.
109 Aristotle says of the city state that “while it comes into existence for the sake of life, it exists for the good life.” Politics, bk. 1, sec. 1.
110 Robert Burns, Holy Willie’s Prayer (1799), ll. 3–4.
111 Mucho takes LSD after describing how “you’d have this big, God, maybe a couple hundred million chorus saying ‘rich, chocolaty goodness’ together, and it would all be the same voice.” Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Perennial Classics, 1965), 116–17.
112 Letter to George Izambard, 13 May 1871. [NF]
113 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 14, E39.
114 See n. 62, above.
115 Immanuel Velikovsky (1895–1979) believed that myths and supposedly miraculous Biblical events were based on real global catastrophes resulting from earth’s close encounters with other planets. Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (ca. 1872–1949) was a mystic spiritual teacher who stressed self-awareness. Structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908) produced a triangular diagram of the three main ways of cooking meat—boiling, roasting, and smoking—and discussed their cultural characteristics.
116 Dylan’s song, “Gates of Eden,” appeared on the album Bringing It All Back Home in 1965.
117 Yeats, The Second Coming, l. 6.
118 McLuhan uses this precise phrase in an interview in Playboy magazine in March 1969, when he says that “From Tokyo to Paris to Columbia, youth mindlessly acts out its identity quest in the theater of the streets, searching not for goals but for roles, striving for an identity that eludes them.” A similar idea is expressed in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 335.
119 This is the French word for earwig, whose name is incorporated into that of the hero of Finnegans Wake, H.C. Earwicker, the twentieth-century everyman. One of his avatars is Persse O’Reilly.
120 See n. 63, above.
121 In an interview with Bruce Mickleburgh, NF remarked that the term “relevance” was a favourite of the Nazi youth movement around 1934, when it was used to hound professors out of their employment; to David Cayley he added that “the Nazis talked about Fachwissenschaft, about target knowledge, and sooner or later the useful came to mean what was essential for waging war. That attitude not only destroyed art and science in Germany for a whole generation; it also helped materially in losing the war for the Germans” (INF, 167, 992).
122 See Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), for the notion that “the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed” (81).
123 According to Engels, nineteenth-century socialist thinkers such as Fourier and Saint-Simon were Utopian (in a pejorative sense) because they were attempting to create an ideal community of restricted size prior to the two requirements of Marxism: the advent of a classless society and the withering away of the state. In that perspective, their Utopian idealism was “unscientific” whereas Marxism would be “scientific” in its rejection of such a partial Utopia.
124 See the last line of Poem 1260, Because that you are going.
125 See Labyrinths (1962), 262. [NF] In NFL is an annotated copy of the augmented ed., ed. Donald A. Yaltes and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964).
1 The essays in question are “Linguistics” by William G. Moulton, “Textual Criticism” by Fredson Bowers, and “Literary History” by Robert E. Spiller. NF’s essay concludes what he calls the series by dealing with “Literary Criticism” in a way which implies that this field of endeavour will not be merely one of the sets of “essential techniques” represented by the other three, but a new departure altogether. Because the publications of the MLA enjoyed (and still enjoy) a wide circulation in North America and Europe and are geared to deal with the most up-to-date problematics in literary studies and the humanities in general, the configuration of the book accurately reflects NF’s position as innovator in the eyes of “the profession” as well as in his own perspective. By saying that “what is meant here by criticism is a further stage in the scholarly organization of literature” (118) he is implying that although linguistics, literary history, and critical editing have each experienced important advances, their role may (or will) become increasingly instrumental in the new dispensation.
2 Housman remarks that “Orators and poets, sages and saints and heroes, if rare in comparison with blackberries, are commoner than returns of Halley’s comet: literary critics are less common.” A.E. Housman, The Name and Nature of Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 5.
3 Gilbert remarks that “Ulysses is a book of life, a microcosm which is a small-scale replica of the universe, and the methods which lead to an understanding of the latter will provide a solution to the obscurities in Ulysses.” Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), 52.
4 In support of the thesis that Marlowe was not killed in a duel in 1593 but survived to write the plays mistakenly ascribed to Shakespeare, Calvin Hoffman opened the tomb of Sir Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe’s reputed lover (the precise location of Marlowe’s own tomb being lost). He found neither helpful documents nor Sir Thomas’s body. See Calvin Hoffman, The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare (1955).
5 W.B. Yeats, Wheels and Butterflies (London: MacMillan, 1934), 27–8. The critic in question is Shane Leslie.
6 See Rymer’s A Short View of Tragedy (1692), chap. 7.
7 The quoted phrase is the opening one of Francis Jeffrey’s famous review of Wordsworth’s Excursion in the Edinburgh Review of 1814; it has become a byword for a critical put-down.
8 This was where NF made his small change, from “point the fact out.”
9 The question, in relation to this example, is in what manner C.S. Lewis fulfils—or does not fulfil—the task ascribed by NF to the academic critic. It is true that Lewis, in discussing Rolland’s Court of Venus, makes derogatory value judgments reflecting his own initial reaction. He says, for example, that the book, printed in 1575, has had few readers; and that its “‘haltand verse’ and its excessively dull prologue are likely to deter any student who is not supported by some historical interest. To recover, at this time of day, the taste for its peculiarly Scottish and medieval blend of galantry, satire, fantasy and pedantry is all but impossible” (The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition [London: Oxford University Press, 1958], 292). But NF, while admitting that this is an example of value judgment, quickly exonerates Lewis by stating that value judgments are essential to academic criticism when they contribute to our understanding of the writer, and that elucidation in turn may change the reader’s evaluation of him. That is precisely how Lewis proceeds in this case, demonstrating that the Court of Venus provides allegorically a “realistic presentation, in some degree satiric, of the contemporary legal world” (293), and a sense of romance, or at least “fantasy or extravaganza” (294). Finally, Lewis admits that there is “real poetry in the words of Desperance as he hears the song of the Muses” (296).
10 “In quibbles angel and archangel join, / And God the Father turns a school-divine” was Alexander Pope’s criticism of Milton’s Paradise Lost (Imitations of Horace, l. 102).
11 Arnold’s conception of culture as a force in society is best expressed in Culture and Anarchy, where a knowledge centred on the “best self” of each class is opposed to the anarchy of individual and class egos.
1 The Greek 
means opinion or conjecture based on slight evidence; suspicion; conjecture.
2 Venus and Adonis, l. 1057. Venus had noted that “No flower was nigh, no grass, herb, leaf, or weed / But stole his blood and seem’d with him to bleed” (ll. 1055–6).
3 The phrase comes from l. 52 of the poem An Ode Secundum Artem, which is ascribed to Cowper provisionally in The Poetical Works of William Cowper, ed. H.S. Milford, 4th ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 288–9, and in earlier editions, one of which NF once owned. Milford gives, “And sweetly, warbling Philomel, shall flow / Thy soothing Sadness in mechanic woe.” The poem is now attributed to Cowper’s friend Charles Lloyd.
4 With this allusion to “critical gossip” having revealed the relationship between The Confidential Clerk and Euripides’ Ion, NF ironically understates Eliot’s predilection for Greek myths, both as poet and playwright. Eliot consciously exploits the “metaphorical concentration” (p. 137) of Greek mythology; in his plays this results in a modern, Christian, very personal transformation of characters and situations. Thus The Family Reunion draws on Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and The Elder Statesman on Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus.
1 Thomas Huxley, Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays (New York: Appleton, 1929), 122.
2 These three books are: (1) L’Eau et les rêves (Paris: Corti, 1942), translated as part of her doctoral dissertation by Edith Rogers Farrell as “Water and Dreams” by Gaston Bachelard: An Annotated Translation with Introduction by the Translator (Dissertation, State University of Iowa, 1965); (2) L’Air et les songes: Essai sur l’imagination du mouvement (Paris: Corti, 1943), trans. as Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement (Dallas Institute Publications, Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, ca. 1988); and (3) La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté: Essai sur l’imagination des forces (Paris: Corti, 1948), for which see Liliana Zancu, Transcendental Dynamics: A Bachelardian Romantic Perspective including the English Translation of “Earth and Reveries of Volition: An Essay on the Imagination of Forces” by Gaston Bachelard (Dissertation, Kent State University, 1975). Bachelard also wrote another book on the element Earth: La Terre et les rêveries du repos (Paris: Corti, 1948).
3 In chap. 6 of The Psychoanalysis of Fire Bachelard uses some of Hoffmann’s fire-related imagery as an example of the manner in which the creator’s imagination selects and systematically privileges one of the four elements. Here, NF speaks of “poetic temperament” as the source of this selection, which results in a “complex,” a panoply of images linking the poet’s psyche to a more universal structural principle. Chap. 6 begins with the seductiveness, in Bachelard’s youth, of the making and consuming of “punch” or “fire-water” (“eau-de-vie”) and associates its delights with the fiery imagination which inhabits the tales of Hoffmann and the life and mind of those animated by it. The conclusion of the chapter confirms the philosophical kinship between Bachelard and NF by affirming the initial complementarity of poetic and scientific thought: “Thus story-tellers, doctors, physicists, novelists, all of them dreamers, start off from the same images and pass on to the same thoughts” (97).
4 Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Norman Page (London: Penguin, 1971), 42. In this preface Dickens refers to the authorities Giuseppe Bianchini and Le Cat; in chap. 33, Krook’s inquest, he also mentions MM. Foderé and Mere. Bachelard mentions Le Cat on p. 94.
1 On pp. 364–6 Campbell notes the similarity between the Gnostic and Mahayana Buddhist attitudes to the body; on p. 371 he remarks that both believe the creator of the world was evil. NF chooses Gnosticism and Campbell’s treatment of it as a most significant example among a variety of “Oriental” tendencies which historically have made it possible for “Western” religions to appear more acceptable to the religious mindsets of “Eastern” populations. Gnosticism was a major irritant to the Christian Church throughout the process of defining its theology, and especially its Christology, because the Gnostics’ unrelenting dualism was incompatible with the idea of a Redeemer assuming human form, and with that of the world and its inhabitants being redeemable. Matter being evil in their eyes, spirit can perhaps temporarily inhabit a human body but never merge with it. NF shows understanding for Campbell’s seeming receptiveness to such forms of belief as Gnosticism with its long history in and far beyond the Graeco-Roman world, because it offers a mythology without institutional and dogmatic borders.
2 In Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World (1861), the Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen argued that the first stage of human society was “a matriarchal society out of which modern patriarchal societies evolved” (xvii); he also held that the first stages of “spiritual maturation” were “dominated by the female point of view” (xlvi). See George Boas, Preface, and Joseph Campbell, Introduction, in Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).
3 For Graves’s idealization of the mother-goddess as the poet’s Muse and the centre of all stories, see his The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: Faber & Faber, 1948).
4 “The Serpent’s Bride” is the title of Campbell’s first chapter, discussing the powerful mother-goddess; Medusa is discussed on pp. 152–3, and the degraded serpent on p. 70.
5 On p. 318 of his copy, NF has underlined “Roman” in this phrase, and put a question mark in the margin. Plutarch was in fact a Greek.
6 Spengler’s views on Levantine or Magian culture are quoted on pp. 223–4, 399–401, 407–8, 435–6, 437–8, and 454.
1 In the Republic, bk. 6, 510–13, Plato uses the simile of the divided line to distinguish, first of all, between two levels of objects of knowledge (the realm of the visible and that of the intelligible), and secondly, within each of these divisions, the degree of knowledge, and therefore truth, which can be attained (from opinion to belief to understanding). Plato’s metaphysical dualism requires an epistemological dualism: knowledge of ideas is more certain than that of images. The inquiring soul devises hypotheses and travels between the two levels but its ultimate aspiration is to reach the invisible “first principle of the whole” in the world of ideas. NF’s use of Plato’s imagery is analogical, perhaps arbitrary; mainly, he wishes the inquiring subject to identify with the object, which is literature, wisely, that is to apprehend and appropriate its innermost principles.
2 See no. 1, n. 51.
3 The original version in College English added at the end of this sentence, “, a mysterious and stylized ‘verbal icon.’” The reference is to W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley’s The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954), which is recalled later, p. 153.
4 The original version of this sentence read, “Criticism, in order to point beyond itself, must be more than merely aware of its limitations: it needs to be actively iconoclastic about itself.”
5 The first chapter of Fielding’s Tom Jones, “The Introduction to the Work, or Bill of Fare to the Feast,” is based on an elaborate simile in which an author is compared to an innkeeper who must display his menu to prospective customers. Fielding says that he will serve up Human Nature, first plain (in the country), and then hashed, fricasséed, or spiced (in the town).
6 Arnold Kettle’s criticism of Jonathan Wild for having no strong character to represent the ethically good position, made originally in his Introduction to the English Novel, was mentioned twice in Satire Newsletter, 1, no. 2 (Spring 1964): once in an article on Heartfree’s function in Jonathan Wild (34), and once by the editors in the course of announcing a symposium on the subject of moral norms in satire (71). For the printed text of NF’s reply, see no. 8.
7 Arnold, Preface to Poems (1853), in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, 204.
8 See no. 1, n. 63.
9 In 1963 Cambridge University Press reprinted the twenty volumes of the academic journal Scrutiny (1932–53). For Leavis’s use of the phrase “the poem is a determinate thing; it is there,” see his “The Responsible Critic” (in the Spring 1953 issue), 19:174. For “unappreciated, the poem isn’t ‘there,’” see “Education and the University (III): Literary Studies” (March 1941), 9:308.
10 Chaps. 51 and 52 of Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (London: Faber & Faber, 1938), 284–95.
11 In what is perhaps his most severe comment anywhere on evaluative criticism, all the more biting because of its brevity, NF compares it here with infantile sexual activity because both the child as seen by Freud, and the evaluative critic, engage in “preliminary,” superficial, incomplete contact with their object. Freud had written that “Children may thus be described as ‘polymorphously perverse,’ and if these impulses only show traces of activity, that is because on the one hand they are of less intensity compared with those in later life and on the other hand all a child’s sexual manifestations are at once energetically suppressed by education” (Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, pt. 2, chap. 13); the topic is further developed in pt. 3, chap. 10. See the Standard edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 15:209 and 16:311–16.
12 Sortes Virgilianae were a form of divination popular in late Roman and medieval times, when Virgil was credited with prophetic powers. A copy of Virgil’s Aeneid was opened at random, and the first passage lighted upon was interpreted as a prophecy applicable to the present situation.
13 This sentence has not been found in Rowse’s work. Rowse often mocks critics in his Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: Macmillan, 1964). His general attitude is illustrated by the remark on Sonnet 107, “All commentators have found its difficulties insurmountable. But to the historian they are not” (221).
14 The quotation comes from canto 63, bk. 2 of The Minstrel (1771–74). See The Poetical Works of James Beattie (London: Bell & Daldy, 1870), 59, for both quotation and footnote.
15 Frederick C. Crews, The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman’s Casebook (New York: Dutton, 1963), 3. The Pooh Perplex is a satire on academic writing, particularly literary criticism. The author has compiled a series of pretentious articles on Winnie the Pooh, which he places under a list of different fictitious authors, the first being Harvey C. Window.
16 In Yeats’s The Phases of the Moon, one character type “follows whatever whim’s most difficult / Among whims not impossible” (ll. 42–3), while one at a different phase chooses “whatever task’s most difficult / Among tasks not impossible” (ll. 96–7).
17 See no. 1, n. 106.
18 See, e.g., the assertion that “Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors …. But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as the temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty.” Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 38–9.
19 A Paul Anka documentary entitled Lonely Boy, after one of his songs, was released in 1962.
20 “Aquinas says: ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur, integritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so: Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance.” James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Chester G. Anderson (New York: Viking, 1968), 212.
1 Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3.2.49.
2 The first line of the song says “Largo al factotum della città,” which means “make way for the top man of all trades of this city.” It continues by dramatizing the multiple calls for Figaro’s help in all his capacities; everyone calls for him, and therefore his fortune is sure to last.
3 When NF says that Don Basilio’s song is “innocuously allegorical” and that he has never understood it, he is undoubtedly being ironical. The allegory is vulgar and obvious: Beaumarchais may have crafted it in accordance with the character of Don Basilio. Figaro is beginning to doubt Susanna’s faithfulness, and Basilio tells Bartolo that Figaro should develop a thick skin and accept his subordinate rank vis-à-vis the Count: “In those years when callow / reason is of little worth, / I too had the same hot passion, / […] But as time and peril passed / Dame Composure appeared […] She led me one day / to a small cottage / and taking an ass’s skin / down from the wall […] Take this, my son! she said […] The storm abated, I set forth, when lo! / I was confronted by a horrible wild beast; […] I lost all hope of defending myself, / but the wild stench of my garment / so robbed the beast of appetite / that despising me, back to the wood it went. / Fate thus taught me / that one can avoid insults, dangers, / shame and death with an ass’s hide!” (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro, libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. A translation into English and French accompanied a 1976 recording from Kingsway Hall, London).
4 Horner in The Country Wife is a notorious gallant, who poses as a eunuch to disarm the suspicion of jealous husbands. His scheme to seduce Mrs. Margery Pinchwife involves her impersonating her sister Alithea, putting it about that the latter is secretly in love with Horner. Alithea herself has two real suitors, her fiancé and her true love. After many complications, Pinchwife is reassured of his wife’s virtue as the neighbours all confirm that Horner is a eunuch, and Alithea marries the man she loves.
1 In the dream that King Nebuchadnezzar has summoned Daniel to reconstruct and explain to him (Daniel 2:31–45), there appears a statue the head of which is gold, while its breast and arms are made of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, and its feet of iron and clay. A huge stone falls from the mountain and shatters these feet of clay. The golden head, according to Daniel, represents Nebuchadnezzar’s own kingdom, which will be followed by an inferior one symbolized by silver, in turn to be replaced by a “bronze” kingdom which will dominate the whole world and will be followed by an “iron” kingdom destined to be divided, because the iron was mixed with clay. Obviously, the allegory is a graphic warning to the king that God will control history.
2 See no. 3, n. 1.
3 Philo Judaeus wrote a number of commentaries on the Pentateuch, including On the Creation of the World, On the Allegories of the Sacred Laws, On the Unchangeableness of God, On the Confusion of Languages, and On the Migration of Abraham.
4 Quæstionum S. Augustini in Heptateuchum, Quæstionum 2.73, in Patrologiæcursus completus, ed. J.P. Migne and A.G. Hamman (Paris: Migne, 1845), 34:625.
5 The fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé (France) is a good example.
6 Thomas Lodge, “A Reply to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse in Defence of Poetry Musik and Stage Plays,” in The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge (New York: Johnson Reprint Co., 1966), 1:8. NF has modernized the spelling.
7 On Bacon’s discussion of the importance of Classical myth and fable for the reform of science in his De Sapientia veterum (1609) (The Wisdom of the Ancients), see Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Routledge, 1968), chap. 3.
8 “A myth, in its simplest definition, is a story with a meaning attached to it other than it seems to have at first.” John Ruskin, The Queen of the Air, in The Crown of Wild Olive and The Queen of the Air, ed. W.F. Melton (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 118.
9 In Anatole France’s L’Île des pingouins the imaginary incident which sparks the whole narrative, and becomes its diegetic basis, is that a medieval priest sees a population of penguins off the coast of Brittany, mistakes them for human beings on the basis of their appearance from a distance and, seized by evangelical fervour, baptizes them. There ensues a period of controversy on earth and in heaven as to the significance and consequences of this unusual act. Eventually it is decided that since the penguins have been baptized, they must be human. Anatole France proceeds to write a whole detailed history of this humanized population which of course satirizes the contemporary French state, and thus constitutes a “continuous allegory” in NF’s sense.
1 In Poetics 1.1 (1447a–b) Aristotle describes how various arts imitate, and how they differ by their means, their objects, and their manner of imitation. “But the art which employs words either in bare prose or in metres, either in one kind of metre or combining several, happens up to the present day to have no name. For we can find no common term to apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and to the Socratic dialogues: nor again supposing a poet were to make his representation in iambics or elegiacs or any other such metre—except that people attach the word poet (maker) to the name of the metre and speak of elegiac poets and of others as epic poets” (Aristotle: The Poetics. “Longinus”: On the Sublime. Demetrius: On Style, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960], 7). The commonality between the arts of language in Aristotle’s text seems to reside in their being arts of “imitation,” like the playing of musical instruments, and dance. The body formed by verse and prose, according to this passage, does not have a common name, it is true; but does this mean that Aristotle had in mind the entire body as yet unnamed of verbal arts of imagination, rather than a series of poetic genres? In other words, is NF attributing to Aristotle his own universalizing concept?
2 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 11.
3 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Modern Library, 1932), 1:167–8.
4 Letter of 7 February 1755. In Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Birkbeck Hill, 1:262.
5 It is the rhetoricity of euphuism, with special reference to sound effects and antitheses, rather than its satirical depiction of affected speech, that serves NF’s argument here. Euphuism, which Lowry Nelson describes elsewhere in the same encyclopedia as this “highly analytical style which ceaselessly dissects, catalogues, compares, and contrasts” (258–9) cultivates form for its own sake and thus diverges from “pure prose,” meant to describe.
6 Robert Greene, Gwydonius, or The Card of Fancy, ed. Carmine di Biase (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2001), 83.
7 Here, NF appears to accept Montaigne’s own stylistic ideal as Montaigne himself practises it—one of complete naturalness which, however, conceals deep rhetorical underpinnings. Cf. Frank Lestringant, ed., “Rhétorique de Montaigne,” Actes réunis par Frank Lestringant (Paris: Champion, 1995).
8 George Bernard Shaw, “A Treatise on Parents and Children” (the preface to Misalliance), sec. 1, in Misalliance: A Debate in One Sitting (New York: Samuel French, ca. 1914), 8.
9 John Donne, “Nineteenth Expostulation,” in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975), 100–1.
10 Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle 2, pt. 1, ll. 11–18.
11 The line quoted is from Poe’s The City in the Sea, l. 23. NF refers to the position Poe developed in his essay “The Poetic Principle” that a long poem is a contradiction in terms as poetic intensity cannot be maintained.
12 Respectively the first line of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Hamlet’s soliloquy from Hamlet, 3.1.56, and the first line of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
13 Gargantua, chap. 5, is famous for its evocative language, “disjunctive” in the extreme, to use NF’s term for poetic devices which by way of connotation invite the reader to imaginatively associate fragmented realities. Entitled “Propos des bien-yvres” in French and “How they chirped over their cups” in the “Bibliophilist Society” English translation illustrated by Gustave Doré, the chapter explosively expresses the collective joy of King Grandgousier’s subjects in learning about the pregnancy of Queen Gargamelle, which will result in the birth of giant baby Gargantua.
14 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1934), 81. The passage appears near the end of “Lotus Eaters.”
1 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 252–3.
2 See no. 1, n. 123.
3 I owe my knowledge of The Diothas, and much else in this paper, to the admirable collection The Quest for Utopia, An Anthology of Imaginary Societies by Glenn Negley and J. Max Patrick (New York: Schuman, 1952). [NF] See John MacNie, writing as Ismar Thiusen, The Diothas or, A Far Look Ahead (New York: Arno Press & The New York Times, 1971), 35.
4 See no. 1, nn. 73 and 74.
5 In Daedalus the phrase is “negatively existential basis”; perhaps the change was made because of the use of “existentially” and “existential” in the next paragraph.
6 Myth and history intermingle in what we know of Lycurgus, believed to be the author of the constitution of Sparta. Herodotus records as history many aspects of Lycurgus’s centralizing activity, while Plutarch signals uncertainties. In any case, the Greek imagination enshrines Lycurgus as the author of the most rigid system of education, and of the strongest state control of the individual, yet seen anywhere.
7 Jowett trans. [NF] See The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Scribner’s, 1872), 2:423–4. This ed. is in NFL. The quotation is accurate, except that both paragraphs end with a question mark in the original.
8 H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 366.
9 In chap. 57 of Gargantua the Abbey of Thélème is indeed an anti-monastery because of its reversal of the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience in its co-educational rule, and a Utopian replacement for monasteries with its economic prosperity, possibility of marriage, and a personal independence that goes beyond the possibility of free use of one’s own time: the motto “do what you will,” which relies on the Thélèmites’ innate sense of the good, announces confidence in man’s freedom and carries Utopian thinking, fictionally, a step further.
10 A Modern Utopia, 265.
11 In his essay “Of Cannibals” Montaigne uses the manner in which the cannibals treat their prisoners to show the greater cruelty of European practices. Europeans “mangle by tortures and torments a body full of lively sense,” whereas the cannibals roast the prisoner, and eat his flesh, only after killing him. Also the cannibals—unlike the Europeans—engage in war only to show their valour, not to conquer territories. Montaigne, Essays, trans. John Florio (London: Dent, 1910), 215–29.
12 The English poem The Land of Cockaygne (dating from the fourteenth century) is a satire of monastic life; the French fabliau entitled Cocaigne dates back to the thirteenth century. Both represent tongue-in-cheek treatments of the fantasy of a land of wish-fulfilment.
13 A wildly popular character in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner, the Shmoo was first introduced in 1948. The “Official Li’l Abner Website” gives a description of this creature: “According to Shmoo legend, the lovable creature laid eggs, gave milk and died of sheer esctasy [sic] when looked at with hunger. The Shmoo loved to be eaten and tasted like any food desired.” Available at http://www.lil-abner.com/shmoo.html (accessed 4 June 2007).
14 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Albert J. Rivero (New York and London: Norton, 2002), 234.
15 “We should say that for a territory the size of the United States five millions of people would be about right…. the human population of the entire world should be kept well under a hundred millions.” Don Marquis, The Almost Perfect State (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1927), 10.
16 Re-Birth is the title under which John Wyndham’s novel The Chrysalids (1955) was published in the United States.
17 In bk. 3, chap. 10 of Sartor Resartus, Carlyle speaks of the two sects of Dandies and Drudges in the nation.
18 “Such was that happy Garden-state / While man there walk’d without a mate / … Two paradises ‘twere in one, / To live in Paradise alone” (Marvell, Thoughts in a Garden, ll. 57–8, 63–4).
19 Henry Thoreau, Walden (London: Dent, 1908), 181 (chap. “Baker Farm”).
20 Ibid., 39 (chap. “Economy”).
21 “Oh leave off saying I want you to be savages. / Tell me, is the gentian savage, at the top of its coarse stem? / Oh what in you can answer to this blueness?” D.H. Lawrence, Flowers and Men, ll. 8–10.
22 Lawrence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938), 107 (chap. “The Passport: The Hotel at Paris”). The caged starling makes Sterne realize the bitterness of slavery, which he had just been minimizing. In the margin of his copy of this edition in NFL, NF has written “effective if somewhat over-slick dovetailing” beside the starling’s words.
23 Socrates talks about the night time when “the wild beast in our nature, gorged with meat or drink, starts up and walks about naked, and surfeits after his manner, and there is no conceivable folly or crime … of which such a nature may not be guilty.” He later sums up the character of the worst man as “the waking reality of what we dreamed.” The Republic, in The Dialogues of Plato, 2:400, 405 (bk. 9).
1 The English Institute was founded in 1939 with the primary goal of re-evaluating English studies as a discipline. It recommended, among other changes, a shift from a positivist, philologically based approach to a more theoretical one. Columbia University played a major role in promoting the English Institute.
2 The Irish ballad-hero Tim Finnegan jumps up and joins in the festivities at his own wake. He provided the title and a symbol of death and resurrection in one of NF’s favourite novels, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
3 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: Harper, 1993), 424.
4 “Oh gods! For surely it’s the work of the gods to recognize one’s loved ones!” Euripides, Helen, l. 560.
1 See The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 17–24. This book is in NFL, annotated no. 1949.
2 See, e.g., p. 125.
3 The reference to Douglas Bush is on p. 62 of Fletcher’s essay. In n. 35 Fletcher cites Douglas Bush, “Literary History and Literary Criticism,” in Literary History and Literary Criticism, ed. Leon Edel, Kenneth McKee, and William M. Gibson (New York, 1965), 6.
4 Jerusalem, pl. 10, l. 20, E153.
5 C.S. Lewis, “The Influence of the Model,” in The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 198–215.
6 Lionel Trilling, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” in Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: The Viking Press, 1965), 3–30. This was a new and enlarged edition of a book first published in 1955.
7 See no. 1, n. 18.
8 On p. 72 Fletcher comments on NF’s Utopian style and says that “the low seriousness of the Odyssey permeates the Anatomy,” which explores the coherence of the critical world. He also links NF’s style to the Odyssey, contrasting it with the “high seriousness” of the Iliad.
9 “In the long run I am all for classicism: that is what the ‘avant-garde’ is. The discovery of forgotten archetypes, changeless but expressed in a new way: any true creative artist is classical … [ellipses in original] the petit bourgeois is the person who has forgotten the archetype and is absorbed in the stereotype. The archetype is always young.” Eugène Ionesco, Notes and Counter Notes: Writings on the Theatre, trans. Donald Watson (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 131.
10 It was Hartman who compared NF to Hurd (130). In addition to his religious writings, Bishop Richard Hurd (1720–1808) produced a series of important literary works. His Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), an instant success, brought renewed attention to the study of medieval and Renaissance literature. Here he says that “This, it is true, is not the classic Unity, which consists in the representation of one entire action: but it is an Unity of another sort, an unity resulting from the respect which a number of related actions have to one common purpose. In other words, It is a unity of design, and not of action.” Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, ed. Hoyt Trowbridge (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), 66–7. An annotated copy of a 1911 ed. is in NFL.
1 NF’s source for this information was probably Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy (in NFL), which on p. 62 quotes from Charles Theodore Stelman’s Approach to Greek Art (New York: Dutton, 1960) the following passage: “Even in the distant age of bronze the inhabitants of Greece and the islands held the skilled worker in metal in very high regard. His art was both a mystery and a delight, and he was thought to owe his gifts to supernatural beings around whom many legends grew. There were creatures called Dactyls, smelters of bronze; Curetes and Corybantes, armourers; Cabeiroi, who were skilful smiths; Telchines, gifted workers in gold, silver and bronze who made weapons for gods and the earliest statues; and lastly the mighty Cyclopes forging the bolts of Zeus. All these are vague giants, goblins and godlings …” (12).
2 See, for instance, Beowulf, ll. 1441–4: “Gyrede hine Bēowulf / eorl-gewæum, nalles for ealdre mearn; / scolde here-byrne hondum gebrōden, / sīd ond searo-fāh, sund cunnian” (“Then Beowulf showed / no care for his life, / put on his armor. / His broad mail-shirt was to explore the mere, / closely handlinked, woven by craft”). From Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition, trans. Howell D. Chickering, Jr. (New York: Doubleday, 1999). The word “searo-fāh,” a compound of “searo,” “contrivance, skill, cunning,” and “fāh,” “decorated, shining, variegated,” is plausibly translated as “curiously or cunningly wrought.” “Searo” and its compounds occur about twenty times in Beowulf, usually in connection with weapons and fighting.
3 Yeats, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, l. 1, “Many ingenious lovely things are gone.”
4 I am not speaking specifically of the Biblia pauperum, but of a generalization about religious art based on the phrase. [NF]
5 See pp. 210–11 for an elaboration of this idea.
6 Preface to Prometheus Bound, in The Poems of Shelley, 206.
7 T.S. Eliot’s discussion of Welsh and Scottish nationalism, etc., appears especially in his chapter “Unity and Diversity: The Region,” in Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber & Faber, 1967; first pub. 1948), 50–66.
8 I have developed this argument further in MC (1967): see particularly the second lecture, “Improved Binoculars.” [NF] Rpt. in NFMC, 27–48.
9 See the exchange of letters printed in the New Yorker, 13 April 1957, 130–6, in which Ford solicits Moore’s suggestions for a name for a new series of cars, which would convey “some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design” (19 October 1955). Moore’s suggestions, including Pastelogram, The Resilient Bullet, The Mongoose Civique, and Turbotorc, were not adopted.
10 “What we have said already makes it further clear that a poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen either probably or inevitably. The difference between the historian and the poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse …. The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particulars facts.” Poetics, sec. 9 (1451a), in Aristotle: The Poetics. “Longinus”: On the Sublime. Demetrius: On Style, 35.
11 See Introduction, n. 18.
1 Eliade uses the phrase in several of his books, but see The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R.Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 4: “they are repeated because they were consecrated in the beginning (‘in those days,’ in illo tempore, ab origine), by gods, ancestors, or heroes.”
2 Discussing the historicity of Confucius, Waley remarks that “I use the term ‘Confucius’ throughout this book in a conventional sense, simply meaning the particular early Confucians whose ideas are embodied in the sayings.” The Analects of Confucius, trans. and ed. Arthur Waley (New York: Random House, 1938), 25. NF has written “Confucianism” beside this sentence in his copy of the book in NFL.
3 Anglo-Israelitism is the belief that the Anglo-Saxon peoples, especially Great Britain and the United States, are descended from the tribes of Israel of the Northern Kingdom, and therefore inherit the promises, guarantees, and responsibilities addressed in the Scriptures to Israel. See O. Michael Friedman, Origins of the British Israelites: The Lost Tribes (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1993); and Tudor Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002).
4 In The Republic, bks. 2 and 3, Plato, in the form of a discussion between Socrates and Adeimantus, repeatedly reproaches narrators, and particularly Homer, for representing gods and heroes in a disrespectful way. Such storytelling is characterized as inappropriate for the young, and a number of Homeric or Hesiodic excerpts are singled out for such criticism. The link with NF’s argument here is that, Plato notwithstanding (but then he too invents myths of his own!), mythical beings cannot be constantly ideal, both because their models in society (i.e. its dominant figures) are usually imperfect, and because the forces of nature often affect human life adversely.
5 See pp. 135, and 244, above.
6 For Browne’s remark that “Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith,” see Religio Medici, 10 (pt. 1, sec. 9).
7 See no. 1, n. 94.
8 See no. 3, n. 1.
9 See no. 14, n. 10.
10 Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 19 (pt. 1, chap.10).
11 See no. 1, n. 31.
12 See no. 10, n. 1.
13 Titles of novels by Tolstoy, Zola, Proust, and Faulkner, respectively.
14 In A Prayer for My Daughter, st. 8, Yeats reflects on how he has seen “the loveliest woman born” (Maud Gonne) become an opinionated “old bellows full of angry wind.”
15 Robert Graves’s view of the dying god is summed up near the end of The White Goddess when he refers to “the single grand theme of poetry: the life, death and resurrection of the Spirit of the Year, the Goddess’s son and lover” (369). He discusses the Judgment of Paris on pp. 232–3. NF has marked the passage with a line in his copy of the book in NFL.
16 Ruskin, Queen of the Air, 123. The original quotation reads “nation,” which may be a typographical error.
17 See, e.g., AC, 136–8/126–8; “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement” (1961), FI, 21–38/EICT, 401–19.
1 John Payne Collier (1789–1883) was an English critic involved with several questionable editions. In particular, he claimed to have discovered a rare Second Folio of Shakespeare’s plays (known as the Perkins folio) with thousands of emendations in a seventeenth-century hand, apparently based on original editions. Used for his corrected edition of Shakespeare (1853), these marginal notes were later discovered to be modern forgeries, probably his own. Thomas James Wise (1859–1936) was an English scholar and book collector who published many bibliographies and around three hundred editions of English authors. Some of the latter were exposed as skilful forgeries in 1934.
1 StS reads, “I have nothing new to say on this question, and I must bring it down to the context of professional routine. I might rationalize this context as being existential, committed, and the like, but even here all I can offer …”
2 W.H. Auden’s “Yeats as an Example” was originally published in The Kenyon Review, 10, no. 2 (Spring 1948): 187–95. Auden remarked of Yeats’s occultism: “I have a further bewilderment, which may be due to my English upbringing, one of snobbery. How could Yeats, with his great aesthetic appreciation of aristocracy, ancestral houses, ceremonious tradition, take up something so essentially lower-middle class …. A.E. Housman’s pessimistic stoicism seems to me nonsense too, but at least it is a kind of nonsense that can be believed by a gentleman—but mediums, spells, the Mysterious Orient—how embarrassing.” See The Complete Works of W.H. Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 2:385.
3 See, e.g., pp. 216–17, “I think criticism becomes more sensible when it realizes that it has nothing to do with rejection, only with recognition.”
4 StS reads simply, “It may be said that it is not really possible …”
5 Dr. Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825) was an English physician renowned for his expurgation of classical texts in which he deleted “objectionable” material in order to make the works suitable for a refined audience of all ages. His best-known expurgated text is the Family Shakespeare, published in 1818.
6 Eponymous heroes of works by Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain.
7 NF’s choice of Yates’s Art of Memory to illustrate his point that there is “nothing in past literature that cannot become a source of imaginative illumination” is indeed relevant on condition that “literature” is understood as part of the wider world of culture. Yates leads the reader through the history of the arts of memory with excitement, in a most personal way, and indeed shows that the objects of her study are sources of “imaginative illumination.” But she does more than convert “dull” and less than “rewarding” handbooks into literary objects; they are about the creative relationship between text and image in the history of culture, and about the psychological and philosophical aspects of memory in that history. Literature is there in the widest sense.
8 Poet laureate Colley Cibber (1671–1757) wrote chiefly for the theatre. He was mocked both in Pope’s Dunciad, a satiric celebration of dullness, and in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews.
9 In The Garden of Cyrus (1658), Sir Thomas Browne talked about basic designs such as the quincunx (an arrangement of five objects with four at the corners of a square or rectangle and one at the centre), which might delineate the whole world.
10 I.A. Richards, considering the difficulty of deciding whether one’s reaction to a poem was sincere or “an accident of fashion,” suggested comparing it with the feelings aroused by certain universal themes such as “the facts of birth, and of death, in their inexplicable oddity.” See Practical Criticism (London: Routledge, 1929), 290.
1 NF attended Aberdeen High School on St. George Street in Moncton, N.B., graduating in 1928. In grade 10 he received 92 per cent in English literature.
2 Joseph Collins, The Doctor Looks at Literature: Psychological Studies of Life and Letters (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1923).
3 The American Little Review began publishing Ulysses in March 1918, but publication was suspended in February 1921, when about half the book had been published. The book was published in England and France in 1922. Publication became legally possible in the U.S. in December 1933, and in Canada in 1950.
4 Pelham Edgar (1871–1948) was professor first of French and then of English at Victoria College, serving as head of English until he retired in 1938. He taught NF his second-year Shakespeare course. Poet E.J. Pratt (1882–1964) taught in the Department of English at Victoria 1919–50. John D. Robins (1884–1952) taught first German and then English at Victoria, eventually serving as head of the English department until his retirement in 1952.
5 Woolf had criticized Bennett and novelists like him for their presentation of a hypothetical Mrs. Brown, whom she imagines travelling in a railway carriage: “With all his powers of observation, which are marvellous, with all his sympathy and humanity, which are great, Mr. Bennett has never once looked at Mrs. Brown in her corner…. They [the realists] have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out the window; … but never at her, never at life, never at human nature” (Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown [London: Hogarth Press, 1928], 16).
6 NF’s tone of irony here signals the fact that the MLA, in his view, is very slow in acknowledging new cultural developments, even those intimately connected with its core interests.
7 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, was published in 1948 (Philadelphia: W. Saunders). It was followed in 1953 by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, by the staff of the Institute for Sex Research, Indiana University, including Kinsey himself, with the same publisher.
8 The Surrealist exhibition was held in Toronto at the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) in the summer of 1938. For NF’s article on it in the Canadian Forum, see NFMC, 92–5.
9 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.7–8.
10 The reference is to the concluding sentence of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (80).
11 Aristotle, Poetics, 9. See no. 14, n. 10.
12 Eric Havelock (1903–88), a professor in Classics, joined Victoria College in 1929, when NF began his studies. For a summary of Havelock’s political writings in the Canadian Forum and their influence on NF, see NFMC, xxvii–xxix. Havelock’s A Preface to Plato was published in 1963.
13 The heading on p. 31 of The Gutenberg Galaxy, “The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village,” encapsulates a main theme of the book, the retribalization of contemporary society.
14 See Aesop’s fable, “King Log and King Stork,” about the frogs who asked for a king. Jupiter first threw them down a log. When they complained at the log’s inaction, he then sent down a stork who ate them up.
1 Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 3, l. 2.
2 According to Heraclitus, fire (rather than light) is the primary, uncreated substance of the universe. “This world […] has been made by none of the gods or men; but it ever was and is and ever shall be an eternal, living Fire, kindled and extinguished measure for measure” (Fragment 30). The substance of things arises from fire and returns to fire, since everything changes into its opposite and back again in the universal process of transformation. Heraclitus recognizes three elements rather than four: “In its transformation the primary substance passes through three fundamental forms; from fire it becomes water, from water earth; in the reverse direction from earth it changes into water and from water into fire” (Eduard Zeller, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950], 47). Indirectly the example of Heraclitus does fit in with NF’s argument since according to Heraclitus man’s soul partakes of fire; and also since the sun revives every day, is extinguished every night, and arises again from the mist of the sea, light is indeed the implicit quality of fire.
3 In Sonnet 33, Full many a glorious morning have I seen, Shakespeare speaks of the morning as “Gilding pale streams with heavenly alcumy” (l. 4).
4 Cf. Proverbs 20:27, “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the belly.”
5 Matthew 5:15–16: “Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick: and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”
6 For NF’s discussion of the apocalypse and resurrection in Blake, and his linking it to the three men in the furnace who walked with the Son of God (Daniel 3:25), see FS, 196/197–8).
7 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, act 4, l. 168.
8 “O quarrying passion, undertowed sunlight! / The basalt surface drags a jungle grace / Ochreous and lynx-barred in lengthening might; / Patience! and you shall reach the biding place!” Hart Crane, The River, ll. 133–6.
1 AC discusses the character types of comedy in the Third Essay under the Mythos of Spring. The senex iratus is defined as the “heavy father” who is blocking the desires of the hero (172/160).
2 Avarice is embodied in L’Avare (The Miser), 1668; snobbery in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The Would-be Gentleman), 1671; and hypochondria in Le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid), 1673.
3 The Oxford English Dictionary attributes this phrase to Shaw, who first used it in a review entitled “Sardoodledom,” Saturday Review, 1 June 1895. He also used the term in the Saturday Review of 17 April 1897. The French dramatist Victorien Sardou (1831–1908) was immensely popular for his wide range of moralizing plays. Some of them derided contemporary mores, and some depicted famous historical figures, but all were heavily “teleological,” which accounts for Shaw’s sarcastic deformation of Sardou’s name, and NF’s adoption of it in drawing attention to extreme examples of the New Comedy tradition.
4 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie (New York and London: Norton, 2006), 20. The correct form of the quotation is, “to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel?”
5 George Puttenham, “Of Poets and Poesy,” in Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2:34. NF has modernized the spelling.
6 Theatre director Mike Nichols and actress Elaine May gained great popularity in the late 1950s with their humorous dialogues satirizing American life.
7 As You Like It, 2.7.139–66.
8 MacBird! was a satirical anti-establishment drama by Barbara Garson based on Macbeth, with a thinly veiled Lyndon Johnson as Macbeth and John Kennedy as Duncan. It was produced in 1966 during the anti-Vietnam War protests and first published later that year.
1 Tillyard writes, for instance, “It may be surmised that if Milton belonged to the present generation he would have distrusted profoundly the idea that a good deal should be yielded to our subconscious desires.” E.M.W. Tillyard, “Paradise Lost: Conscious and Unconscious Meanings,” in Milton Criticism: Selections from Four Centuries, ed. James Thorpe (London: Routledge, 1965), 190. Reprinted from E.M.W. Tillyard, Milton (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930), 268–9.
2 See no. 1, n. 46.
3 See no. 6, n. 3.
4 For Spitzer, see no. 1, n. 16. Literary critic Eric Auerbach (1892–1957) was best known for his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953), in which a fragment was examined to yield the vital characteristics of the whole.
5 Letter to Georges Izambard (13 May 1871), in Lettres de la vie littéraire d’Arthur Rimbaud, ed. Jean-Marie Carré (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 39.
1 “‘If the law supposes that,’ said Mr. Bumble, ‘the law is a ass—a idiot.’” Dickens, Oliver Twist, chap. 51.
2 Anonymous review in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, February 1848, in Emily Brontë, “Wuthering Heights”: A Casebook, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Macmillan, 1970), 47.
3 Tennyson speaks of a land “Where Freedom slowly broadens down / From precedent to precedent” (You ask me, why, though ill at ease, ll. 11–12).
4 The reference is to the proceedings following the 1968 convention of the Democratic party in Chicago, where opponents of the Vietnam war organized a major demonstration and were forcibly dispersed by armed police. The “Chicago seven” (originally eight) demonstrators had been on trial since 24 September 1969. Actually, shortly after NF’s lecture, on 18 February 1970, all the defendants were acquitted of conspiracy charges. Five were sentenced to prison and a fine for crossing state lines to incite a riot, and for contempt of court, though most of these sentences were abolished on appeal.
5 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 4:59.
6 NF may be thinking of the remark that “It is a matter of faith that nature—as she is perceptible to our five senses—takes the character of … a well-formulated puzzle. The successes reaped up to now by science do, it is true, give a certain encouragement for this faith.” Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, trans. Sonja Bargmann (New York: Crown, 1954), 295.
7 See n. 4, above. American poet Allen Ginsberg was not one of the seven but gave testimony on their behalf (later published, San Francisco: City Lights, 1975). Blake was one of his favourite poets.
1 For student and Nazi demands for “relevance,” see pp. 106–7. The term “neo-Nazi” qualifies the dictatorial peremptoriness of calls for making the study of the humanities meaningful to society at large and therefore, more particularly, to the present-day undergraduate. The term “relevance” had acquired a very negative meaning for the humanities research community in Canada as it was facing demands from government and the public at large for justifying the budgetary needs of humanities research. Consciously or not, the students whose dissatisfaction NF describes were “throwing the baby out with the bath water,” so to speak, when they failed to distinguish between the endlessly relevant exploration of the literary system in all its dimensions, and mere literary archaeology.
2 In Daedalus, NF added, “I am afraid too that they also abandoned most of the students ill-advised enough to take it.”
3 “Fellowship Lecture: The Imaginative and the Imaginary,” an address to the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Toronto, May 1962, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 119 (October 1962): 289–98, and rpt. in FI, 151–67 and EICT, 420–35, as “The Imaginative and the Imaginary.”
4 Hermann Lotze, Microcosmus: An Essay concerning Man and his Relation to the World, trans. Elizabeth Hamilton and E.E. Constance Jones, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1888). The work is divided into nine books, dealing respectively with The Body, The Soul, Life, Man, Mind, The Microcosmic Order, History, Progress, and The Unity of Things. These books are further subdivided into five chapters each. Finally, the chapters are broken down individually into smaller topical sections, such as “Forces and their Universal Laws.” The result is a book that appears to deal with vast concepts in an orderly and manageable fashion.
5 NF served as a part-time advisor to the Canadian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC), 1968–77.
6 Here, once again, NF takes an independent position, while at the same time appearing to be in dialogue with major trends in Comparative Literature and in literary theory both in Europe and North America. Indeed the multipronged attacks on traditional literary history focused on its use of the concept of influence as a theoretically unsound causal factor for explaining change and innovation in literature. In 1964 the International Comparative Literature Association, meeting in Fribourg, devoted half of its fourth congress to the concepts of imitation, influence, and originality. See its Proceedings, vol. 2, ed. François Jost (The Hague: Mouton, 1966); and even earlier, among many other examples, Claudio Guillén, “The Aesthetics of Influence Studies in Comparative Literature,” in Comparative Literature: Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, ed. W.P. Friederich (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 1: 175–92.
7 Barnabe Googe (1540–94), composer of eclogues and translations; Thomas Churchyard (ca. 1520–1604), a wandering soldier and hanger-on of the court, composer of numerous small volumes of verse and prose.
8 Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1932); see, e.g., his p. 50, n. 7.
9 The image comes from the “Conclusion” of T.S. Eliot’s The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933). [NF]
10 Yeats wrote the preface to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël, trans. H.P.R. Finberg (London: Jarrolds, 1925), in which he confessed to having poor French when he first read the play, which “seemed all the more profound, all the more beautiful, because I was never certain I had read a page correctly” (7). He quotes the line “as to living, our servants will do that for us,” which in the actual translation appears as “Live? Our servants will do that for us!” (284).
11 NF himself shows, in AC, the kinship created between the two authors by their practice of “third-phase” satire: “The gigantic figures in Rabelais, the awakened forms of the bound or sleeping giants that meet us in Finnegans Wake and the opening of Gulliver’s Travels, are expressions of a creative exuberance of which the most typical and obvious sign is the verbal tempest, the tremendous outpouring of words in catalogues, abusive epithets and erudite technicalities which since the third chapter of Isaiah (a satire on female ornament) has been a feature, and almost a monopoly, of third-phase satire…. Nobody except Joyce has in modern English made much sustained effort to carry on this tradition of verbal exuberance” (236/220–1). For a study of the similarities in their inventive approach to language, see, e.g., Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, The World’s Words: A Semiotic Reading of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” and Rabelais’ “Gargantua et Pantagruel” (Paris: Alyscamps Press, 1993). In Joyce et Rabelais (Paris: Didier, 1972), Claude Jacquet shows that Joyce jotted down in a notebook many of the words discussed in a secondary study, L. Sainéan, La Langue de Rabelais (Paris: Boccard, 1922), and used them in Finnegans Wake.
12 In 1967, as a result of student unrest, the Macpherson Committee published its Report, recommending the abolition of Toronto’s Honour Courses; they were replaced in 1969 by a “New Program” with a less rigid structure and more choice. The individual college departments at the University of Toronto were amalgamated after the Memorandum of Understanding in 1974.
13 See the sonnet by Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, in which he compares his amazement to that of Cortez on first seeing the Pacific Ocean.
14 See NP, 5–6, 21–2.
15 See no. 1, n. 12.
16 In After Strange Gods Eliot expressed his belief in the value of a settled, traditional society and deplored the effects of individualism and cosmopolitanism on modern literature. NF was probably particularly outraged by Eliot’s advocacy of a homogeneous population: “What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” See After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, [1934]), 20.
17 S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (1924).
18 NF’s bibliographical survey, “William Blake,” appeared in The English Romantic Poets and Essayists: A Review of Research and Criticism, ed. Carol W. and Lawrence H. Houtchens (New York: MLA, 1957), 1–31; M&B, 266–89. Between 1957 and 1973 several of the early books that NF mentions without praise had been republished: Arthur Symons’s William Blake (1907) by Cooper Square, 1970; Alfred T. Story’s William Blake: His Life, Character, and Genius (1893) by Haskell House, 1970; Basil de Selincourt’s William Blake (1909) by Kennikat Press, 1972; Allardyce Nicoll’s William Blake and His Poetry (1922) by A.M.S. Press, 1971; and Ernest Short’s Blake (1925) by Haskell House, 1970. The prize for the world’s worst book on Blake is not awarded, but NF does list the two latter among five studies of that period that are “expendable.”
19 John Keats, letter to George Keats, 19 February 1819, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:67.
20 Pauline Kogan [pseud.], Northrop Frye: The High Priest of Clerical Obscurantism (1969).
21 Swift contrasts the ancient poets, or bees, with the modern, or spiders, who boast “of drawing and spinning out all from yourself” and “[turn] all into excrement and venom.” Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, ed. A. Guthkelch (London: Chatto & Windus, 1908), 18. The phrase NF quotes is from Bacon’s The New Logic, bk. 1, aphorism 95, which contrasts the rationalists (spiders) with true philosophers (bees).
22 For the dates of Edgar, Pratt, and Robins, see no. 18, n. 4.
23 Read “seldom,” in view of the award to Bertrand Russell. The word “never” is a word that humanists should seldom use. [NF]
24 NF had such a secretary from 1967 on in Jane Widdicombe.
25 Conclusion to the first edition of Literary History of Canada, C, 351.
26 This Plotinian topos was perhaps what Augustine had in mind when he wrote in the Confessions that God was “everywhere and nowhere in space” (bk. 6, chap. 3). In his essay “Circles” Emerson writes, “St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere and its circumference nowhere” (Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher [Boston: Houghton, 1957], 168). For an overview of the origin of the definition, see William A. Nitze, “Pascal and the Medieval Definition of God,” Modern Language Notes, 57, no. 7 (November 1942): 552–8; and Warren Kirkendale, “‘Circulatio’-Tradition, ‘Maria Lactans,’ and Josquin as Musical Orator,” Acta Musicologica, 56, fasc. 1 (January–June 1984): 78.
1 Socrates stated that he believed that the earth is vast, “and that we who dwell between the river Phasis and the Pillars of Hercules inhabit only a minute portion of it—we live around the sea like ants or frogs around a pond—and there are many other people inhabiting similar regions” (Phaedo, 109a–b).
2 Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, 1929–51, had instituted a course for freshmen based on “great books of the Western world” to counter the dominant “progressive” theories of education. He himself was editor of Nicolas Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), vol. 16 of the series Great Books of the Western World.
3 Bacon speaks of Copernicus’s “assumptions” as “the speculations of one who cares not what fictions he introduces into nature, provided his calculations answer.” Francis Bacon, “Description of the Intellectual Globe,” in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al., 15 vols. (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann, 1963), 5:517 (chap. 4).
4 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London: Dent, 1932), 2:57 (pt. 2, sec. 2, memb. 3). Against this passage in his copy in NFL, NF has written, “same sceptical conclusion as Milton, but more cheerful, and the cancelling out of authorities is a genuine dialectic.” The work Burton refers to is Helisaeus Roeslin, De Opere Dei creationis (Frankfurt: 1597).
5 John Donne, Ignatius His Conclave (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1977), 13–14. NF has modernized the spelling.
6 Thomas Campion, What if a day, or a month, or a yeare, ll. 13–16.
7 To what extent can Descartes’s use of the image of the sun be associated with a radical change in the history of consciousness? The sun as source of light and therefore as a symbol of consciousness are pre-existent notions; the question is whether and how Descartes innovates by emancipating consciousness from merely reproducing images drawn from what NF calls “the lower part of nature” (335). In the Third Meditation, Descartes compares two ideas of the sun: one drawn from everyday experience, which makes it appear small, and one drawn from “astronomical reasoning” which makes it appear much larger. This gradually leads Descartes to state that “the nature of an idea is such that of itself it requires no formal reality except what it derives from my thought, of which it is a mode” (The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham et al. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 2:28). There follows a process of distinguishing between ideas which originate in objective reality, and those originating in the self. In the case of ideas of corporeal things, such as the sun, Descartes sees nothing in them which would “make it seem impossible that it originated in myself” (2:29). Hence a gradually more active role for consciousness in the production of knowledge.
8 Cathects are objects injected with libidinal energy.
9 George Bernard Shaw, preface to Androcles and the Lion, in Androcles and the Lion, Overruled, Pygmalion (London: Constable, 1931), 45–6.
10 This is the second section of the medieval university curriculum, taught after the trivium of logic, rhetoric, and grammar, and comprising arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
11 Timaeus, 29a. The translation is not that of either of those in NFL (Lee in the Penguin ed., and Jowett), but is close to that of F.M. Cornford in Plato’s Cosmology (1937) and the Loeb version by R.G. Bury (1929).
12 Swift published several papers under the pseudonym Bickerstaff satirizing Partridge as a quack, beginning in 1708 with the publication of “The Accomplishment of the First of Mr Bickerstaff’s Predictions; being an account of the death of Mr Partridge, the almanack-maker, upon the 29th instant,” followed by “An Elegy on the supposed Death of Partridge, the Almanack-Maker” and “An Epitaph on Partridge.”
13 Examples from 1968–72 include Fred Gettings, The Book of the Zodiac: An Historical Anthology of Astrology (London: Hamlyn, 1972); Daniel Logan, Your Eastern Star: Oriental Astrology, Reincarnation and the Future (New York: W. Morrow, 1972); Sybil Leek, My Life in Astrology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972) and Sybil Leek’s Astrological Guide to Successful Everyday Living (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970); Edward Lyndoe, Astrology for Everyone (New York: Dutton, 1970); Dal Lee, Dictionary of Astrology (New York: Paperback Library, 1968); and Rupert Gleadow, Your Character in the Zodiac (London: Phoenix House, [©1968]).
14 No. 206 of his Pensées, normally translated “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.”
15 This became particularly manifest in French Romanticism. Alfred de Vigny, whose pessimistic vision in many ways reflects Pascal’s anxiety in the face of an infinite universe, writes to a mysterious female entity named Eva: “Vivez, froide Nature, et revivez sans cesse / Sous nos pieds, sur nos fronts, puisque c’est votre loi; / Vivez, et dédaignez, si vous êtes déesse, / L’Homme, humble passager, qui dût vous être un Roi; / Plus que tout votre règne et que ses splendeurs vaines / J’aime la majesté des souffrances humaines: / Vous ne recevrez pas un cri d’amour de moi” (La Maison du berger, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. F. Baldensperger [Paris: Gallimard, 1948], 1:181). Alphonse de Lamartine, in his famous Le Lac, deplores the immensity and inhumanity of time: “Ainsi, toujours poussés vers de nouveaux rivages, / Dans la nuit éternelle emportés sans retour, / Ne pourrons-nous jamais sur l’océan des ages / Jeter l’ancre un seul jour?” (Poésies [Paris: Hachette, 1962], 50).
16 Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 1, ll. 286–91.
17 Abraham Cowley, Davideis: A Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David, in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of William Cowley, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 2:58 (bk. 1, ll. 447–82). In this and the following quotations, NF has modernized the spelling.
18 Ibid., 2:68n. 34.
19 Ibid., 2:68n. 37.
20 Browne, Religio Medici, 19 (pt. 1, sec. 16). In the margin of his copy NF has written, “God is Man.”
21 See no. 1, n. 61.
22 This is an important aspect of CP (no. 1), but also of the entire theoretical stance as described in the fourth part of the book. It relates to the social function which the poet as mouthpiece of myths held in common fulfilled in primitive societies, but fulfils less and less as formulations of truth increasingly become objective truths of correspondence; poetry needs to return to the earlier language of myth rather than to mimic the myth of progress.
23 Abraham Cowley, To the Royal Society, in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of William Cowley, 1:167–8 (stanza 4, ll. 1, 3).
24 The ode, originally published without a title in The Spectator, 465 (23 August 1712), can be found in Addison: Selections from Addison’s Papers Contributed to the Spectator, ed. Thomas Arnold (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), 471.
25 In Goethe’s Faust, the Prologue in Heaven, in which Raphael and Gabriel describe the cosmos (“The sun proclaims its old devotion / In rival song with brother spheres”), is preceded by a humorous Prelude in which the Director boasts of the marvels of German stagecraft (“We have stars galore …. Thus on these narrow boards you’ll seem / To explore the entire creation’s scheme”). See Goethe, Faust: Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), ll. 231–51.
26 1 Corinthians 15:52, “For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible.”
27 Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, ed. Simon Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 63.
28 For Johnson’s comment on the last stanza of An Ode in Honour of St. Cecilia’s Day (ll. 55–63), see The Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (New York: Octagon Books, 1967), 1:440.
29 In the Poetics, 24.10, Aristotle argues that the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities.
30 Quoted from The Plough and the Pen: Writings from Hungary, 1930–1956, ed. Ilona Duczynska and Karl Polanyi (1963). [NF]
31 See no. 1, nn. 73 and 74.
32 William Morris, The Earthly Paradise, Prologue: The Wanderers, ll. 1–6.
33 NF refers to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970).
1 Dylan Thomas, Altarwise by Owl-Light, Sonnet 1, ll. 5–6
2 Sir John Davies, Nosce Teipsum, pt. 2, Of the Soule of Man and the Immortalite Thereof, in The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London: Chatto & Windus, 1876), 1:54 (st. 145, ll. 581–4). NF’s modernized spelling perhaps suggests he was quoting from a different edition.
3 As the angel Raphael explains to Adam, “For wee have also our Ev’ning and our Morn, / Wee ours for change delectable, not need” (Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 5, ll. 628–9).
4 Orchestra, in Complete Poems, 1:168–9 (sts. 22–3, ll. 148–61). NF quotes l. 4 as it appeared in Davies’ first edition; later it was changed to “And which indeed is elder then [sic] the sun.”
5 Spenser, Mutabilitie Cantos, canto 7, st. 58, ll. 1–9. In this and the next item, NF quotes from the Cambridge edition (in NFL) of Spenser’s Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Hougton Mifflin, 1908), which slightly modernizes the spelling.
6 “For, all that moueth, doth in Change delight: / But thence-forth shall rest eternally / With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight: / O that great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight.” Mutabilitie Cantos, canto 8, st. 2, ll. 6–9.
7 Mutabilitie Cantos, canto 7, st. 59, l. 3.
8 Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 2, l. 911.
9 Shakespeare, Sonnet 124, l. 12.
10 Colin Clout’s vision is in Faerie Queene, bk. 6, canto 10, st. 15, l. 1–st. 16, l. 5. In st. 28 Spenser asks permission of Queen Elizabeth “underneath thy feete to place her prayse” (l. 7).
11 See p. 347, above.
12 Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), bk. 9, ll. 468–70.
13 Wordsworth encounters Mont Blanc in The Prelude (1850), bk. 6, and grieves to have a “soulless image” replacing a “living thought” (ll. 523–8). Coleridge in his Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni (1802), invokes the “dread and silent Mount” until it vanished from his thought and he “worshipped the Invisible alone” (ll. 1–16). Shelley describes the mountain’s appearance in his Mont Blanc (1817), ll. 60–4.
14 Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 76.
15 Wordsworth, Sonnets from the River Duddon: After-Thought (1820), l. 14.
16 Herod remarks that, “It is a long time since anyone stole the park benches or murdered the swans. There are children in this province who have never seen a louse, shopkeepers who have never handled a counterfeit coin, women of forty who have never hidden in a ditch except for fun. Yes, in twenty years I have managed to do a little. Not enough, of course … Still it is a beginning.” W.H. Auden, For the Time Being (London: Faber & Faber, 1945),113.
17 Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 26.
18 Ibid., 80.
19 Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, in The Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde, ed. Stanley Weintraub (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 195.
1 Paul Hernadi, Beyond Genre ([Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,] 1972): the comment is only on the title, not on the book itself. [NF] In Beyond Genre, Paul Hernadi concurs with what NF states here—ironically perhaps—about genre theory still being in its infancy; he calls for a not purely classificatory view of genre, but one that would be inductive and hermeneutically effective towards the understanding of the literary work.
2 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, chap. 9.
3 Anonymous, Rats Away, in Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, ed. Kenneth Sisam (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 170, ll. 1–6. This is annotated no. 364 in NFL.
4 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, bk. 1, canto 1, st. 41.
5 François Villon’s Ballade des Dames du temps jadis (fifteenth century) provides an example of the “ubi sunt” convention with its well-known refrain, “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” (Where are the snows of yesteryear?).
6 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, bk. 2, canto 4, st. 35, and the preceding line.
7 Anonymous, Erthe upon Erthe, ll. 1–4. See Hilda M.R. Murray, The Middle English Poem, Erthe upon Erthe, Printed from Twenty-Four Manuscripts (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 1.
8 Villon, Le Grand Testament, in Poésies complètes, ed. Pierre Michel (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1972), st. 81, l. 3. The phrase translates as “bodies rotten and souls in flames.”
9 Donne’s Devotion 15 (Meditation, Expostulation, and Prayer) is prefaced with the line: “Interea insomnes noctes Ego duco, Diesque” (I sleepe not day nor night). John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Raspa, 77.
10 Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (1863).
11 John Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 7, ll. 216–17.
12 Quoted from Anerca (1960), edited by Edmund Carpenter. [NF] NF reviewed this volume for “Letters in Canada: Poetry: 1959” in the University of Toronto Quarterly, July 1960 (C, 220–2).
13 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, bk. 2, canto 12, st. 70, l. 7–st. 71.
14 NF quotes from the first four lines of the poem; the refrain, in l. 8, begins “cras amet qui numquam amauit,” translated in this ed. as “Are ye loveless or love-lorn? Yours be love to-morrow morn!” Pervigilium Veneris (The Vigil of Venus), ed. Cecil Clementi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936), 192–3.
15 “With pungent sauces, multiply variety / In a wilderness of mirrors.” T.S. Eliot, Gerontion, ll. 64–5.
16 Poe, Ulalume, ll. 30–8.
17 First Epistle of John 1:1–3, as translated in the American Standard Version of 1901. At AC, 329/309, NF quotes the Authorized Version.
18 Chaucer’s friar, a satirical figure, is said in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales to use this formulaic expression for gain: “So plesaunt was his “In principio,” / Yet wold he have a farthing, er he wente. / His purchas was wel better than his rente” (Prologue, ll. 254–6).
19 See no. 14, n. 2.
20 The riddle, “What’s worse than a woman?” occurs in multiple ballads, referred to by Child as “Riddles Wisely Expounded,” but the one that most closely fits NF’s description is version “C,” an anonymous Scottish ballad titled The Unco Knicht’s Wowing. See The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Francis James Child (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882), 1:4–5.
21 Anglo-Saxon Poetry, trans. R.K. Gordon (London: Dent, 1926), 308, 305. This is annotated no. 84 in NFL.
22 The passage is quoted from Ch’u Tz’u, The Songs of the South, trans. David Hawkes (1959); Beacon Press ed. (1962), 42. [NF]
23 Thomas D’Urfey’s The Fool’s Preferment, or The Three Dukes of Dunstable was set to music by Henry Purcell: “I’ll Sail Upon the Dog Star,” in English Songs Renaissance to Baroque: High Voice, ed. Steven Stolen and Richard Walters (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 1996), 74–5.
24 Gertrude Stein, “Orange In,” in Tender Buttons (New York: Haskell, 1970), 58.
25 Ibid., 22.
26 Dissociation of sensibility is Eliot’s term for the characteristic shortcoming of poets after the sixteenth century. Having lost the ability to amalgamate disparate experiences, they either thought or felt, but could not do both together. Tennyson, Eliot complained, “ruminates” (“The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 288). Eliot stresses Dante’s “clear visual images” in “Dante,” Selected Essays, 242. In On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), he comments on Milton’s failure in visual images; in his copy of the work in NFL, NF has bracketed the sentences “At no period is the visual imagination conspicuous in Milton’s poetry” (139) and “in reading Paradise Lost, … our sense of sight must be blurred, so that our hearing may become more acute” (157). For the judgment on Swinburne as a poet of words, in whom meaning is “merely the hallucination of meaning,” see the essay “Swinburne as Poet” in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920), esp. 149.
27 Quoted from Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter ([New York: Simon & Schuster,] 1936)[, 175]. [NF] Taken from Josh Billings, Everybody’s Friend, or; Josh Billing’s [sic] Encyclopedia and Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor (Hartford: American Publishing, 1874), 192.
28 Poem 745, l. 1, in Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (London: Faber & Faber, 1970).
29 Samuel Butler, Characters, ed. Charles W. Davies (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University, 1970), 306–7.
30 Dickinson, Poem 1463 in its entirety.
31 Dickinson, Poem 1395, ll. 3–4.
32 Milton, Paradise Regain’d, bk. 3, l. 329.
33 Stephen Hawes, The Passtyme of Pleasure, ed. William Edward Mead (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 40–1 (ll. 911–18). NF has modernized the spelling.
34 Not Ideas about the Thing But the Thing Itself is a poem by Wallace Stevens (1964). Williams’s expressions are similar: “No ideas but in things,” in The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (N.Y.: New Directions, 1967), 390; “no ideas but in things,” Paterson, bk. 1, pt. 1, l. 14.
35 Wallace Stevens, Connoisseur of Chaos, ll. 13–18.
36 See the end of the essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays, 289–90.
37 See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958), chap. 14. [NF]
38 T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, sec. 2, l. 28.
39 For Mallarmé’s notion that poetry lies “in the image emanating from the reveries which things arouse in us,” and that “To name an object is largely to destroy the poetic enjoyment,” see Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Evolution of Literature,” in Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 21.
40 Anglo-Saxon Poetry, 300.
41 NF is referring to Paul’s famous statement in 1 Corinthians 13:12, translated in the AV as “For now we see through a glass, darkly.” According to a note in the New American Standard Bible, which translates the clause as “Now we see in a mirror dimly,” “dimly” is literally “in a riddle.” The words “dimly” or “darkly” translate 
etymologically related to “enigma.”
1 See Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 52–4.
2 “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great mind simply has nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York: Penguin, 1982), 183.
3 Letter to Richard Woodhouse (27 October 1818), in The Letters of John Keats, 1:389.
4 “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays, 17. The whole essay propounds the “impersonal theory of poetry” and makes the comparison of the poet to a catalyst frequently referred to by NF.
5 At AC, 350/325–6, NF comments on “the confused swirl of new intellectual activities today associated with such words as ‘communication,’ ‘symbolism,’ ‘semantics,’ ‘linguistics,’ ‘metalinguistics,’ ‘pragmatics,’ ‘cybernetics,’ and the ideas generated by and around Cassirer, Korzybsky, and dozens of others in fields as remote … as prehistory and mathematics, logic and engineering, sociology and physics.”
6 The reference is to the legend according to which Hercules, the strong man, fell in love with the strong-willed Omphale, Queen of Lydia, and for three years led an effeminate life as her slave spinning wool for her.
7 See no. 13, n. 5.
8 Blake, Annotations to Thornton, p. 10, E669.
9 Critical Inquiry reads “who were pagans.” The reference is to the Neoplatonist philosophers Iamblichus of Chalcis (ca. C.E. 245–325), a disciple of Pythagoras and defender of polytheism, and Proclus (ca. C.E. 410–85), who championed paganism above Christianity. Fletcher had quoted Harold Bloom’s remark, in his A Map of Misprision (30), that NF “increasingly looks like the Proclus or Iamblichus of our day” (751). In regard to his being called a neo-Gnostic, NF may have in mind the criticism of his “Gnostic mythopoeia” by Wimsatt, quoted on p. 220.
10 In his Laocoön; or, The Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), aesthetic philosopher G.E. Lessing used the Hellenistic sculpture of Laocoön and his sons entwined by a serpent to discuss the separate functions of painting and poetry (painting bound to the moment, poetry depicting sequence and movement) and to deplore their confusion.
11 P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous (1959), 248. [NF]
12 W.B. Yeats, The Choice, ll. 1–4.
13 Blake, The Four Zoas: Night the Ninth, p. 138, l. 25, E406.
14 “The Eternal Great Humanity Divine. planted his Paradise, / And in it caused the Spectres of the Dead to take sweet forms / In likeness of himself.” Blake, Milton: Book the First, pl. 2, ll. 8–10, E96.