Whatever the attitude toward Northrop Frye's prodigious schemes, one cannot doubt that, in what approaches a decade since the publication of his masterwork [Anatomy of Criticism], he has had an influence—indeed an absolute hold—on a generation of developing literary critics greater and more exclusive than that of any one theorist in recent critical history. One thinks of other movements that have held sway, but these seem not to have depended so completely on a single critic—nay, on a single work—as has the criticism in the work of Frye and his Anatomy. For example, pervasive as was T. S. Eliot's influence, it joined almost at once and indistinguishably with that of a number of followers who tried to systematize the master's casual essays drawn together from here and there. But with Frye, there is no difficulty disengaging master from disciple, nor even Frye's own later and lesser works from the masterwork. His followers and his ensuing works produce in the main simplifications and extensions of—even footnotes to—the Anatomy, the Word propagated and translated, thinned in order to be spread.

The unequalled sweep with which the Anatomy has gathered to itself our theoretical imaginations is largely due to the unequalled sweep with which it claims to embrace our entire conceptual world…. There is a satisfying lack of inhibition in the cosmic pretension with which Frye permits the imagination to chart the galaxies dreamed of by human desires. And this pretension, in its very recklessness, has seized the imagination of the rest of us, long inhibited by the unyielding finitude flung upon us like a blanket by the critical tradition of T. E. Hulme and Eliot. The audacity of Frye's mythophilia is an alternative appealing through the very assertion of its autonomy. Responsible only to itself and, thus, to our dreams of wish-fulfillment, the free-ranging mythic universe shifts its galaxies at will to answer every need. It freely rotates in patterns beyond the fixed sublunary purposes of our pedestrian interests which require the universe to stand still. As pedestrians, we persist in hunting for equations, echoes, parallels, or just analogues among Frye's schematic groupings; and we do find some—or almost do, but not quite. Shifts in axis give each of his constellations a different center. Together they elude our two-dimensional spatial need to systematize and thus assimilate them.

Such diagrammatic attempts to freeze the dynamic fluidity of Frye's categories account for the simplifications and reductions that Frye's followers and opponents have worked on the original grand mythic scheme in order to make it hold still either to be applied or to be attacked. And his followers have been at least as guilty as his opponents. Indeed on occasion his own more popularly directed essays have as seriously sacrificed the earlier shifting fullness of his entire scheme. It is true, of course, that critics who tried to take Frye whole could not then put him to their uses; they could only apprehend him aesthetically as having the unusable completeness of a poetic entity. So it must for the most part be said that we have not been responding to the totality of his modes in their own deceptive movements so much as we have been, as followers, adapting his work or, as antagonists, disposing of it for our own more parochial purposes. However we have been using him by putting him to our tests, we have not paused sufficiently to accommodate ourselves to him or him to the total march of critical theory. Few except the most faithful (and these therefore too uncritically) have selflessly tried to uncover the source of his power, together with the cost—the expense in theoretical soundness—which that power exacts. We must attempt that critical search, however, with a daring that matches his daring if not, alas, with a wit that matches his wit. (pp. 221-23)

Frye's admitted propensity to spatialize literature has led others to spatialize him, to flatten him into the firmness of diagram. But often there is too little awareness that his space can be Einsteinian, its relations defiant of the two-dimensional page, its categories as slippery as time itself. Frye is far more difficult and deceptive than others have often made him or than he has often made himself in writings after the Anatomy. Too frequently, then, the swirling galaxies of Frye's autonomous universe have been fixed in a single position, as by geocentric man, in accordance with the terra firma commanded by pedagogic interests. And what made that universe so uniquely provocative—its elusive, free-swinging character—is lost. (p. 223)

[In contrast] to the careful distinctions among entities, functions, subject and object drawn by traditional modern theory, in Frye's theory subject, object, and universal—critic, man, poet, work, world, and literature or world-as-dream—all merge into the One that receives all, the One that the world-as-dream becomes even as it becomes the all-transforming creative act of man. No wonder critics in the wake of Frye have devoted themselves increasingly to "vision" and visionaries, to romantic and utopist poet-philosophers. Further, since his notion of epiphany does permit Frye to leave open the possibility of a momentary breakthrough of the desired into the real, of utopia into the resistant world of things, his position can—like an earlier romanticism—have immediate political consequences for those who are in earnest about the egalitarian possibilities of the "classless" society. In all these respects, a vision is being pressed that apparently seeks to define, in the extremest terms possible, the humanist and romantic attitude which Hulme so bitterly denounced in the name of the classic and Christian traditions. It is as if Hulme's too simple caricature of romanticism had truly created itself out of his projections and now reached back to haunt the tradition he so sternly sought to protect. (pp. 229-30)

[The] archetypes of Frye have no metaphysical sanction. They are a humanistic construct of common man in search of his dream which he creates out of his need for wish-fulfillment. Thus the democratic universality of mythic structures is dependent on the universality, the commonness, of the structure of human desires—even to the ultimately universal dream of man, the "classless" civilization. But this would seem to be an empirical claim, subject to empirical evidence, and in need of an agreed-upon upward reading of the stories of our literature in the direction of spring and summer, as the quest for rebirth. In citing these two dominant archetypes of Frye, quest and rebirth, I suggest that unromantic readers are more convinced by death than rebirth, more convinced by the poverty they find than the pot of gold to which the rainbow promises to lead them in quest. Since obviously the history of our criticism has allowed many alternative readings of literature, we must realize that, far from meaning an empirical claim, Frye is rather creating, within the zodiac of his wit, galaxies that respond to his own poetic vision, even as his vision responds to Blake's. It is a vision, gorgeously complete in its dizzying schematics, that can be responded to by all celebrants of man in his spring and summer mood, the romantic singers of the golden world, the utopist questers for an Eden that nostalgia will not permit them quite to forget or forego and that irony will not permit them quite to attain for the fallen daytime world.

Frye's vision must then be seen as his own construct of the world of our literature in terms of his desires, as he would like it to be. What he gives us is the authorization, indeed the licensing, of what earlier positivistic theorists and philosophers disparagingly used to call the "emotive," as they worried about the primary role of wish-fulfillment in the structures of poets and of too-ambitious philosophers. In the fashion of the early I. A. Richards, they used "emotive" to outlaw poetry from the realm of meaningful discourse, and apologists for poetry protested by trying to demonstrate how poetry did give meaning to life. But Frye rather insists on the emotive as poetry's only content and would not have it otherwise; he celebrates poetry precisely for the characteristic that its old enemies proclaimed as its weakness and that its old friends sought to deny. And his licensing poetry according to this definition is also the licensing of his own way of theorizing—so revolutionary in its relation to the theoretical tradition—and of his theory itself as a massive poetic vision with all its swirling galaxies.

The lunar sweep of vision—beyond "Dull sublunary lovers' love, / Whose soul is sense"—must prevent Frye from claiming, with many modern critics, that literature in the narrow sense has a unique role in creating that vision. For him the power of vision must be one with the power of the human imagination to create its structures, poetic or otherwise. The romantic imagination, in search of unmediated vision, must transcend the finite body of the poet's controlled precision in language just as we have seen it transcend the world's body itself…. The philosopher, the critic—social-political as well as literary—must be admitted with the poet, so that, like Arnold before him, Frye is led outward from literature to culture and civilization at large, all of them products of imagination, nature (science's nature) given human form…. (pp. 234-35)

If Frye must liberate literature from sublunary experience, if, further, he must liberate the poet's imagination from bondage to the sublunary language allowed it by a Hulme-like critic, so he must liberate the critic from the stringent procedures of a sublunary critical discourse. For the critic also is an imaginative creator of a lunar world. As Frye—in deference to the ubiquity and primacy of vision—permits the literary imagination to expand to a culture's or a civilization's imagination, as he allows literature to expand to include all structures of thought, so he clearly must include the critical imagination within the literary, within what Blake termed the "poetic genius." The fidelity of the critical imagination must be first to its own free creatures, even before its fidelity to the creatures of others, of the poets, and surely before its fidelity to the bounds of critical discourse as agreed upon by the theoretical tradition from Aristotle to—shall we say—Wimsatt. To the last, Frye seems to demand systematic irresponsibility, a willful recklessness. For his is not only a revolutionary conception of the poet and of criticism, but a revolutionary conception of the nature and function of critical discourse. Whatever may be the accuracy of Wimsatt's assault on Frye's discursive methods [see excerpt above], we must ask whether it is appropriate to Frye's elusive disdain for the methodological presuppositions which underlie all such assaults; whether it "is like trying a man by the laws of one country, who acted under those of another," as Pope said of neoclassical attacks on Shakespeare. Unlike traditional theorists, Frye means to leap the barrier between discourses: between criticism and poetry, between himself and William Blake. To do so, he must tear criticism free of those very encumbrances that constitute the measure of Wimsatt's critique. (pp. 235-36)