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Northrop Frye Biography

Herman Northrop Frye CC FRSC (July 14, 1912 – January 23, 1991) was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.

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Northrop Frye Quotes

We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it still with us.

Writing, Looks, Use, Human, Nature, Haunting

Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.

Advance, Benefit, Benefits, Kind, Science, Superstitions

Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

Copying, Made, Novel, Poems, Novels, Poetry

Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.

Blue, Cat, Exhibits, Human, Imagination, Imaginative

It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to surrender precision for flexibility.

Bible, Language, Metaphor, Precision, Surrender

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.

Book, Writing, Myth, Read, Rewrite

What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.

Art, What If, Criticism, Belong, Cosmology

It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question "Who am I?" than by some such riddle as "Where is here?

Confronts, Identity, Important, Paradoxes, Problem

Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.

Eat, Enough, Fundamentals, Language, Problem, Sleep

The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.

Literal, Poetic, Primaries, Primary

Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.

Literature, Mythology, Humans, Society

A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.

Criticism, Crystal, Doe, May, Quite, Willing

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.

Block, Emotional, Thinking, Panic, Irrational

There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.

Degrade, Destroy, Language, Mankind, Way

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.

Children, Mean, Thinking, Primitive, Produce

The ups and downs of this cosmos may sometimes be acknowledged to be metaphorical ups and downs, but until about Newton's time most people took the "up" of heaven and the "down" of hell to be more or less descriptive.

Cosmos, Heaven, People, Ups

Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that "freezes" into a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world.

Bible, Body, Imagery, Logos, Men, Narrative

Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.

American, Canadian, Historically, Rejects, Revolution

Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of

Art, Generation, Growing Up, Merge, People

I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: The most conscientous student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.

Bible, Doe, Literature, Misconstruing, Realized, Students

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Northrop Frye Biography

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