Northrop Frye
Northrop Frye
Herman Northrop Frye, CC FRSCwas a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth14 July 1912
CitySherbrooke, Canada
CountryCanada
understanding intellectual culture
Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
long literature lasts
Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.
mean writing people
A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.
writing people giving
For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.
block emotional intuition
It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.
book writing myth
Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.
sleep fundamentals language
Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.
imagination world anything-goes
In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
literature classic produce
Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.
book world patient
The book is the world's most patient medium.
country psychology world
Our country has shown a lack of will to resist its own disintegration .. . Canada is practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony; colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics.
copying made novel
Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.
travel past europe
The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible... to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.
children mean simple
Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean.