Broadcast 17 November 1972
From the CBC audiotape no. 892, reference no. 721117-3, released by the Centre for Cassette Studies, 1975, and transcribed by Robert D. Denham. This was an interview broadcast on the CBC on Ideas, as fifth of a series of ten programs on symmetry in the arts. The interviewer was James Robertson.
ROBERTSON: We asked Dr. Northrop Frye why he called his book on William Blake Fearful Symmetry.
FRYE: I used this quotation from Blake’s most familiar poem, The Tyger, because I thought it would be recognized by the public and also because I felt a great deal of Blake was bound up with his conception of symmetry, which was partly a revolt against the eighteenth-century, classical conception of symmetry. Poets always develop a type of verse which suits their habit of thought, and Blake was looking for something in metre, or at least in a poetic rhythm. He was almost the first to realize that we’d taken in so many long words from Latin and Greek that the speech of the ordinary educated Englishman was getting to be a kind of polysyllabic babble, and that to represent the language of ordinary speech in English you need a longer line than the pentameter. If you compare Blake’s Prophecies with the blank verse in, say, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, you’ll see that Blake is very much closer to the language of ordinary speech than Shelley is. I think that’s the reason why his line is longer. “He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars / General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite & flatterer.”1 That kind of rhythm in speech needs more breath, needs more length.
He says in his preface to Jerusalem that he wanted the rhythm of his poetry to fit the curves of what he was saying. He remarks in that connection that “Poetry Fetter’d, Fetters the Human Race!”2 He disliked the poetry of Dryden and Pope with the stopped couplet because for him that was an antithetical mode of thought which represented the kind of symmetry that he most disliked. With his poetic rhythm there is much more of a sense of the line not only lengthening to accommodate longer words but also spilling out into other lines and forming larger paragraph rhythms. It’s not unlike what Milton was doing in Paradise Lost, except that Milton’s texture is the texture of humanist, seventeenth-century rhetoric. Blake’s texture is founded more on the colloquial speech of the eighteenth century.
His use of metre is a very fluid and flexible one. He does not actually go to the point of writing what we should call free verse. I think that he had enough sense of the traditional epic quality—the convention of the old, borrowed punctuating of rhythm of song on the harp or the lyre—to want to keep a recurring rhythm in his poetry. But within the limits of the long line that he uses, he adopts a kind of musical rhythm where the structure is very much what it is in music. That is, in music you can have a certain time-beat and then within the measure you can have a variable number of notes. Similarly in Blake, you can have six or seven beats to a line but a variable number of syllables in between the beats.
ROBERTSON: So we can find symmetry in William Blake’s forms, in his metres and lines and stanzas. How about his metaphors, symbols, images, and vision?
FRYE: Blake’s use of metaphor has several aspects. I said that he was in revolt against a certain kind of symmetry in the eighteenth century. If you look at the stopped couplet in Dryden and Pope, you’ll see there a sense of symmetry that Blake considered a static symmetry. That is, the first line of a couplet is always completed by the second half. So what you have is a conception of symmetry in which the second half neutralizes the first half and so brings it to a kind of stop. Blake’s sense of symmetry was more inclined to the conception of symmetry Hegel was later to develop in philosophy, where instead of one action neutralized by its opposite you have the thrust and counter-thrust of two opposing forces.
Blake has different views of allegory. He defines it in one place as, really, the use of metaphor. At other places he distinguishes allegory from what he calls vision. That is, in poetry you often have a technique of allegory where the author believes that other things are more important than the literary expression. Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, is an allegory because Bunyan was much more interested in religion than in literature, whereas Blake could never be more interested in anything else than he is in the arts. So for him a work of literature has to carry its own meaning, but the meaning is not to be interpreted from something outside literature, as it is in allegory.
In Blake, the unit of his poetry is an image, like the image of the tiger, the lamb, the little boy lost, and so on. This image is, as he says, seen by the imaginative eye, which means that it is a kind of storm centre of mental and imaginative forces. It means a great many things in a great many different contexts. As soon as you have said that the tiger means this or that, there are always twenty-seven other things that it also means. So you may as well give up trying to count the number of different things it means and recognize that it is simply a force or centre of meanings and significances. That, of course, brings you to a conception of symmetry which is the power that holds the living organism together. I think that Blake was always very emphatic on the distinction between what he calls mathematic form and living form. By that distinction he meant the two kinds of symmetry that I mentioned a moment ago, the static symmetry, which gives you an abstract design like a building, and the kind of dynamic symmetry that enables a tiger to be a unit and still be a tremendous force.
ROBERTSON: William Blake was not a poet only. He was a designer and an artist too. Is his design symmetrical?
FRYE: If you read Blake’s poems as he intended them to be read, you find that you’re not really reading a text so much as looking at a sequence of plates. There is often a pictorial design accompanying the poem, and there may be any proportion of text and design. Very frequently you see in the design something that looks like a rather static form of symmetry. That is, you may find two angels over a human figure and their wings balance exactly. Yet if you look again, you’ll find that Blake’s drawing of, for example, the human body is very much out of drawing according to all the academic standards of his day because what he’s interested in is expressing the symmetry of the body in movement. Consequently, the look of the body on the page is in some respects a distortion. I was told once by a curator of a museum in which there are a great many Blake drawings that of all the people who came in to study Blake’s drawings one of the types that turned up most regularly were students of ballet. That is, they found in Blake’s approach to the human body exactly what they were looking for, the sense of the shape of the body in movement and action.
I think Blake was obviously revolutionary in his approach both to poetry and to painting in his time. While there were revolutions going on, they were not going on in England. England was trying to sit on all the revolutions it could sit on. Consequently, somebody of Blake’s outlook was regarded as insane. His attitude, which was pretty consistent all his life, was that it was what England meant by sanity that was really insane. So naturally, he would not be a person with very much influence during his lifetime. It’s actually taken about a century since his death for us to catch up with the contemporary quality of what he had to say. I think that Blake knew better than any other Englishman of his time how very important the revolutionary movements in his day were, particularly the American Revolution and the French Revolution. He was also almost the only poet of his time to grasp anything of the significance of the Industrial Revolution. He saw in all this something which had great powers for evil, against which he warned very sharply. He saw also opportunities for other things, and in particular he understood the possibility of developing a more revolutionary mode of thought. That’s what I’ve been trying to characterize as his sense of dynamic symmetry.
He says, “Without Contraries is no progression.”3 You have to have both love and hate, good and evil in human existence, and it’s their struggle against one another that constitutes life. The living organism is something which is a kind of logical paradox, even an impossibility. That is, it’s alive, it has movement, it has force, it has power, it can change its position, and yet at the same time it’s a unity, it holds together. That means that the vital symmetry of the organism, the body, expresses something asymmetrical in relation to what he calls mathematic form, that is, the stasis, the balance, the completing of one thing by another thing. Yet the body, the living organism, is not really asymmetrical, because it creates another kind of balance against its environment, against the things that it lives among.
For Blake, I think it’s essential that symmetry should always be an aspect of unity. He makes fun of what he calls the “cloven fiction”: that is, of splitting reality into a subject and an object—of seeing two sides to everything. That’s the usual conception of symmetry: you put a chair on one side of the room and then you balance it by putting a chair exactly like it on the opposite side of the room. For Blake, symmetry was something worked out by something which was unified and alive as a part of the tension within its own being. The kind of symmetry that Blake disliked, that he thought was dead, which he calls “mathematic form,” is always founded on duality: that is, on an opposition of two things which remain two things, like good and evil or subject and object. This he always associated with what he called “generalization,” which starts out with a conception of a world split between mind and matter, where man goes to work in a world which is not himself and tries to arrive at some kind of living compromise out of the antithesis between himself and nature.
Since for Blake symmetry was always an aspect of unity, it follows that he was trying to get away from the general, which leaves you with two things: the particular and the universal. He is always emphasizing in his theory of art the importance of what he calls “Minute Particulars,” that is, the detail. The reason for his emphasizing it is that it is only in the minute particular that you can see the universal, whereas all you can see in the generalization is the abstraction. That’s what Blake means when he says “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the Palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”4 The minute particular is the grain of sand, which is also the world, or it’s a flower, which is also heaven. That means that words like “infinite” and “eternal” do not mean space and time going on forever and forever and never stopping (he calls that “the indefinite”). For him, infinity means the real here, the thing that’s at the centre of space, and eternity means the real now, the thing that is at the centre of time.