Foreword

N O R T H R O P F R Y E IN R E T R O S P E C T

The publication o f Northrop Frye's Notebooks troubled some o f his

old admirers, myself included. O n e unfortunate passage gave us
Frye's affirmation that he alone, o f all modern critics, possessed
genius. I think o f Kenneth Burke and o f William Empson; were
they less gifted than Frye? O r were George Wilson Knight or Ernst
Robert Curtius less original and creative than the Canadian master?
And yet I share Frye's sympathy for what our current "cultural"
polemicists dismiss as the "romantic ideology o f genius." In that
supposed ideology, there is a transcendental realm, but we are
alienated from it. T h e genius is a person at least more open to that
transcendence than most o f us are.
Historicists assert that genius is only an eighteenth-century idea,
in which the saint and the hero were replaced, as they were by
Goethe, widely renowned as "the genius o f happiness and astonish-
ment." T h e r e had been at least three earlier meanings o f genius:
one's attendant spirit or natural endowment or aspiration. Frye's
declaration o f genius prompts m e to an impish archaism: was this
Magus o f the North attended by a spirit? It seems likelier that Frye,
a formidable ironist, would refer to his aspiration, more even than
to his natural endowment.
I fell in love with Frye's Fearful Symmetry, his study o f William
Blake, when it was published in 1947, my freshman year at Cornell.
I purchased the book and read it to pieces, until it was a part o f me.
A decade later, when Anatomy of Criticism was published, I b e c a m e
one o f its first reviewers. I am not so fond o f the Anatomy now, as I
was more than forty years ago, but I probably absorbed it in ways I
no longer can apprehend. In later years, whenever I lectured at
Toronto, Frye would introduce m e with considerable polemical fer-
vor, making clear that his Methodist Platonism was very different
from my Jewish Gnosticism. I place this upon record, since I have
come to praise Frye in this foreword, though with a certain ambiva-
lence. Frye disliked the idea o f an anxiety o f influence, and told me
that whether a later writer experienced such an affect was due en-
tirely to temperament and circumstances. W h e n I replied that influ-
ence anxiety was not an affect in a person, but the relation o f one
literary work to another, and so the result, rather than the cause, o f
a strong misreading, my heroic precursor stopped listening. He had

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