The Northrop Frye Quote Book. Northrop Frye
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ancient.
“Gordon Webber and Canadian Abstract Art” (1941), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Art, Moslem
In Moslem art I notice that the effect of a great mosque is overall, in contrast to the cathedral where you move from point to point.
Entry, Notebook 21 (1969–76), 340, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
Arthurian Legends
The Arthurian legends might well have become, in a different cultural setting, the starting point of great apocalyptic visions of Celtic triumph and Teutonic or Latin disaster, paralleling the Biblical dreams of a fallen Babylon and an eternal Jerusalem.
“History and Myth in the Bible” (1975), Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.
Articulation
Articulateness is the only freedom, and relates only to the individual. All society can do is to arrange for conditions of this freedom.
Entry, Notebook 54-8 (late 1972–77), 61, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (2004), CW, 15
The better the poem, the more precisely and inevitably it expresses the inarticulate need for articulation.
“Interior Monologue of M. Teste” (1959), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.
Artists
Art flourishes when the artist is regarded, not as a long-haired wild-eyed shaman, but as a skilled labourer who gets properly paid for his work — whether he is famous or anonymous does not matter.
“The Jooss Ballet” (1936), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
The “artist” too, of course, is an intermediate figure between aristocrat & beat, with the same satyrical display of balls.
Entry, Notebook 12 (1968–70), 44, The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy (2002), CW, 9.
Most of the world’s best art has been produced by men who had genius but were otherwise no better, to say the least, than ourselves. (That, incidentally, is why no artist can become a classic until he dies, for his death separates his genius from his life, and so releases and purifies the former.
“Education and the Humanities” (1947), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
The creative artists are important because their works are the only visible and audible models of what is going on. The rest of it is a mysterious process in which the activity of God takes place through human beings, both the living and the dead.
Entry, Notebook 50 (1987–1990), 459, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 5.
Arts
Literature is unique among the arts in being able to reflect the world escaped from, in its conventions of tragedy and irony and satire, along with the world escaped to, in its conventions of pastoral and romance and comedy.
The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (1971), “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975 (2009), CW, 27.
I merely stress the possibility, importance, and genuineness of a response to the arts in which we can no longer separate that response from our social context and personal commitments. As for the danger of poetry becoming a “substitute” for religion, that again is merely bad metaphor: if both poetry and religion are functioning properly, their interpenetration will take care of itself.
“Expanding Eyes” (1975), “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975 (2009), CW, 27.
The arts in their turn cannot help releasing the powerful acids of satire, realism, ribaldry, and fantasy in their attempt to dissolve all the existential concretions that get in their way.
“Second Essay: Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.
For the arts reflect the world that produces them, and everything the detractors of modern art say about it is true, except that what they are objecting to is not so much something in our art as something in our lives.
“Academy without Walls” (1961), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
In other words, the arts belong to a conception of reality in which reality is something that man makes, something that man constructs himself, so that when the issue is raised about the rights and wrongs of such reality, we have to raise the question of what our vision of society is in the largest sense.
“The Social Importance of Literature” (1968), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Everything worth doing and done well is an art, whether love, conversation, religion, education, sport, cookery or commerce.
“Part One: The Argument,” Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947, 2004), CW, 14.
Arts & Sciences
The individual artist is a representative of human imagination, just as the individual scientist is a representative of human reason.
“Speculation and Concern” (1966), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
The natural direction of science, then, is onward: it moves toward still greater achievements in the future. The arts have this in common with religion, that their direction is not onward into the future but upward from where we stand.
“Humanities in a New World” (1958), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
But subjective art is as impossible a conception as subjective science. The arts are techniques of communication.…
“Speculation and Concern” (1966), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
For the arts, including the liberal arts, do not, like the sciences, improve: they revolve around certain classics, or models, which will remain models as long as the art endures.
“Comment” (1961), Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature (2010), CW, 29.
The sciences are primarily concerned with the world as it is, and the arts are primarily concerned with the world man wants to live in. What is not readily recognized is the fact that both require the same mental processes.
“The Primary Necessities of Existence” (1985), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
The polarizing of creative power between vision and sense is the basis of the distinction between the arts and the sciences. The sciences begin with sense, and work towards a mental construct founded on it. The arts begin with vision, and work towards a mental construct founded on it.
“The Imaginative and the Imaginary” (1962), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.
The sciences demand intellect, the arts demand good taste, or disciplined imagination and emotions.
“By Liberal Things” (1959), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
… fifty years of teaching have only confirmed my conviction that only the arts and sciences are stable social realities: everything else simply dissolves and re-forms. The world of 1989 is no more like the world I was born into in 1912 than it is like the Stone Age, but nothing has improved since then except scientific and scholarly knowledge, and nothing has remained steady except human creative power.
“Speech at the New Canadian Embassy, Washington” (1989), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Assassination
It seems almost as though the Hitlers and Stalins of the world do not get shot because the people who hate them are the