Altogether, Frye's work represents one of the most impressive achievements in the recent history of criticism…. Although many have disagreed with him, especially with his attempt to formulate a comprehensive and systematic theory of criticism independent from value judgments, few within his own field have ignored him. (p. 51)

[Frye's] work "is still there" after all the objections have been raised. The farther back from the whole of his work we stand the less important these objections tend to become. This means that the value of Frye's work depends finally on distancing ourselves from the local complaint and the particular debatable issue. It is from this perspective—one having to do with Frye's conception of criticism as a whole—that a provisional assessment can be made. First, Frye's work is of practical value, a system of terms and doctrines and a method which can be used to answer one kind of critical question. Second, his criticism is a creative and aesthetic achievement in itself: it has final as well as instrumental value. And third, his writings taken together form what might be called a metacriticism, reaching far beyond literature itself in an effort to account for and defend all the products of human culture. In this respect, Frye provides a meaningful apology for the humanities and a way of doing criticism on a grand scale.

To say that Frye's criticism is practically valuable is to say that the theory can be applied to good advantage in interpreting literature. But we must recognize what his system can and cannot do. It is clearly of limited value in helping to determine all the formal relations which combine to produce particular literary works. He offers guidance in rhetorical analysis only at the median level of generality. In discussing a comic work, for example, the total form of comic action is more important for him than whether or not a given work manifests every phase of the total form. Thus, his concern is not to determine what makes an individual comedy a special kind of poetic whole but to see how it relates both to other comedies and to an ideal comic form. He characteristically moves away from, rather than into, the literary work, and thus he emphasizes the thematic, narrative, and archetypal similarities among literary works rather than the explication of single texts. The question is not whether one approach is better than the other. They are simply different. And for his own kind of critical study Frye has provided a powerful set of analytical tools. The evidence for this is not only his own work but the growing number of critics who have found his general approach, his special categories, and his method of criticism genuinely useful. (pp. 52-3)

Those who have found Frye's work to be the New Criticism writ large, while correctly discovering some important influences, have committed the error of misplaced emphasis. My own view is that Frye will be seen historically as having moved far beyond the New Critical assumptions because he is primarily interested in asking questions different from those of the New Critics. And there is value in this, insofar as Frye's universalism has helped to deflect criticism from a myopic organicism to a wider view of literature. It is frequently said that the New Criticism, for all its contributions to formal analysis, reduced criticism to explication or at least tended to see close analysis as the preeminent critical task. Despite a degree of caricature in this judgment, it is nevertheless true that Frye has helped us to see that there are other ways of talking meaningfully about literature. This is to say not only that a pluralism of critical methods should prevail but also that Frye's work, as a healthy corrective to the New Critical emphasis, helps insure that a pluralism will prevail.

Pluralism is not the same thing as Frye's vision of complementary critical methods. He talks too often about the archetypal approach as the one way for breaking down barriers among critics and about a syncretism of interpenetrating views for us to label him a critical pluralist. But he has attacked provincialism on many fronts and thus has helped to extend the range of critical questions that may be legitimately asked. At a time when realism and irony dominate the literary world he has reminded us that a complete "iconography of the imagination" must account for myth and romance as well, that comedy is as deserving of critical attention as tragedy. A large measure of Frye's practical value depends finally on his opening up the critical world to questions previously slighted and to literary works frequently neglected; and on his providing us with some excellent analytical tools and an extensive glossary of concepts to better accomplish one kind of critical task. (pp. 53-4)

It is significant that Frye labels one of his forms of prose fiction the anatomy. This extroverted, intellectual, and often satiric form is born of a thematic interest, replete with catalogs and diagrams, encyclopedic in scope, and reliant on the free play of intellectual fancy; like its forerunner, the Menippean satire, it "presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern."… All of which seems to describe quite well Frye's magnum opus itself, even without the title's calling it to our attention. Many readers have felt that the Anatomy—with its own oracular rhythm, aphoristic manner, associational logic, with its cyclical and epicyclical designs—is in part, at least, a narrative to be unraveled or a design to be contemplated. (pp. 55-6)

The clearest expression of [the strong aesthetic interest that radiates from all of Frye's writing] is in the schematic structures Frye erects and upon which he builds his elaborate taxonomies. He says that criticism must be schematic because the nature of poetic thinking itself is schematic. Whether the patterns Frye observes—his five modes of fiction and five levels of symbolism, his four mythoi and twenty-four phases, and so on—actually exist in literature or whether they exist in the mind of their beholder is not always an easy question to answer.

Attempts at a taxonomy of literature would seem to be pointless if the aim is merely to attach labels, but the desire to know and to name literary differences and similarities is another matter. Frye's schematic taxonomy is in part a method for ordering recognized doctrines, the best example of which is the second essay of the Anatomy. But he also sees classification as a propaedeutic for inquiry. It is a method for isolating a subject of discussion so that inquiry may proceed. There is also in Frye's taxonomies a peculiarly inventive quality which seems to spring from a rage for order that is aesthetically rather than instrumentally motivated. (p. 56)

[Sometimes] Frye seems to offer literature as an explanation for his categories rather than vice versa: literary works become exemplary explanations for the schema itself…. [William] Righter is correct in underlining the impression we often have that Frye's critical order itself is an imaginative construct which needs no justification other than its own existence. Perhaps this should not be surprising, considering the fact that Frye practically equates poetry and criticism at the anagogic level. In Fearful Symmetry Blake as poet and Frye as critic tend to merge into one: it is often difficult to determine whether we have Blake's ideas or Blake as interpreted by Frye or simply Frye's ideas themselves. It is almost as if the critic has become artist, forging his own myths out of the uncreated conscience of his race.

In fact, because Frye sees criticism as creative, he has frequently emphasized the necessity of breaking down the barriers that separate the artist from the critic…. Frye does not want us to think of criticism "as somehow subcreative, in contrast to the 'creative' writing of poems and novels." His own work illustrates the kind of creativity Wilde describes in "The Critic as Artist."

How are we to respond to this creative aspect of Frye's work, to his intricate schematic designs and his rage for order? Are we to lament the fact that it obliterates the traditional distinction between the first-order language of poetry and the second-order language of criticism and thus conclude, with William Righter, that Frye's work is a "perversity of invention," and "eccentric episode in literary history"? Are we to look upon Frye with suspicion because the total form of his criticism is a source of pleasure in itself? I think not. There is no good reason why criticism cannot instruct and delight at the same time.

This is to say that Frye's criticism goes beyond a strict functionalism where practical and utilitarian values reign supreme. Readers who find a special fascination in the creative intellectual structures Frye builds must make their appeal finally to taste and sensibility. But there is no need to apologize for the aesthetic interest or to consider Frye's criticism less valid because of it. (pp. 58-60)

There is finally … more to be said of Frye's intricate formal structure than simply that it delights; for it contains a kind of truth which, although not literally corrigible in the way of a philosopher like (say) Popper would like, is nonetheless real. The structure itself teaches us by explaining. It tells us much about the world of literature that we did not previously know and that we could not have said in any other, more literal form. To say that the formal structure itself has explanatory power is to point back to my first claim, that Frye's criticism has instrumental value. And to say that the formal structure embodies one kind of truth is to point forward to my final claim, that Frye's critical theory is similar to metaphysics. (pp. 60-1)

If we define metaphysics as speculative (rather than empirical) inquiry, which asks questions about first principles and the nature of reality, then Frye in some respects is not unlike a metaphysician. He has his own solution to the problem of the One and the Many and to the materialist-idealist dilemma. The most crucial points of his theory depend on premises about the relation between mind and body, space and time, being and becoming. He has developed his own expansive, conceptual universe in which all forms of thought, action, and passion are assigned their appropriate places…. Frye, of course, is not actually constructing a metaphysical system, but what he does construct has its roots in the grandeur of conception and the subtlety of thought that distinguishes metaphysics.

The great metaphysical systems, like Plato's or Spinoza's have a range and variety and power which makes them survive critique and "refutation." The eminence of the mind behind them has something to do with this resiliency and vitality. Another reason, as John Holloway remarks [see excerpt above], is that "metaphysical systems are often generated by some hitherto neglected great idea of which the writer has taken possession: some radically new point of view from which life may be seen—from which the lines of force, as it were, may be seen running in new directions." Although Frye is not doing metaphysics, he does invite us to consider a broad point of view from which things take on a new appearance. And behind it all we see a distinguished intellect thinking and writing. With the analogy in mind, we might say that Frye constructs a "metacritical" universe.

It is a universe in which art stands at the center, flanked by history, action, and event on one side and by philosophy, thought, and idea on the other. Art, for Frye, is the preeminent creation of man because it figures forth the imaginative world most fully and most obviously, and the imaginative world is the locus of Frye's ultimate values. But criticism, as already said, is not restricted merely to literature and the arts. It includes all verbal structures. This is the hypothesis upon which Frye builds his theory of culture and which permits him, because criticism is the unifying principle of culture, to practice his craft upon such a grand scale. One of Frye's readers, E. W. Mandel, observes that the relationship of criticism to culture is the "informing principle" of Frye's work. The more Frye writes, the more accurate Mandel's observation becomes. Certainly a part of Frye's power as a critic derives from the catholicity of perspective which permits him to apply to the nonliterary aspects of culture the principles he has learned from literature. Similarly, both fictional and nonfictional discourse are subjected to his centrifugal gaze because they are both forms of imaginative projection. The keystone of Frye's metacriticism, we keep discovering, is his doctrine of the imagination.

In The Secular Scripture Frye remarks that "not all of us will be satisfied in calling the central part of our mythological inheritance a revelation from God, and, though each chapter in this book closes on much the same cadence, I cannot claim to have found a more acceptable formulation."… The context of this observation is still another of Frye's many efforts to name the imagination's sense of otherness, but what is perhaps most revealing about the passage is the dependent clause, tucked away in the middle. To speak of the cadence of closure calls our attention to the close relationship between the rhythm of Frye's ideas and his sense of an ending. Like the reversible motto of Eliot's "East Coker," Frye's endings are also his beginnings. The conclusions to many of his books, even to chapters within books, frequently return to his own sense of what is fundamental—glimpses of that "third order of experience" which only the imagination can provide. The return of endings to beginnings is still another example of the continuity which … characterizes Frye's work.

The metacritic engages in a bold enterprise, and he cannot help but be haunted by the many fallen structures which lie along the road to the eternal city of man's dreams, both intellectual and imaginative. Much is risked because much is attempted. The ambition to write on such a broad front, as Frye himself points out, makes a critic particularly vulnerable to objections. But in Frye's case the risk has been worth taking: a great mind has produced a great body of knowledge which will continue to instruct and delight so long as critics ask questions and dream dreams. (pp. 61-4)