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Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination
"Any publication by Northrop Frye is an important literary event; this one is of the highest importance to Canadian literature." -- Globe and Mail
Originally published by Anansi in 1971, The Bush Garden features Northrop Frye's timeless essays on Canadian literature and painting.
In this cogent collection of essays written between 1943 and 1969, formidable literary critic and theorist Northrop Frye explores the Canadian imagination through the lens of the country's artistic output: prose, poetry, and paintings. In the collection, Frye offers insightful commentary on the works that shaped a "Canadian sensibility," and includes a comprehensive survey of the landscape of Canadian poetry throughout the 1950s, including astute criticism of the work of E. J. Pratt, Robert Service, Irving Layton, and many others.
Written with clarity and precision, The Bush Garden is a significant cache of literary criticism that traces a pivotal moment in the country's cultural history, and the evolution of Frye's thinking at various stages of his career. These essays are evidence of Frye's brilliance, and cemented his reputation as Canada's -- and the world's -- foremost literary critic.
Originally published by Anansi in 1971, The Bush Garden features Northrop Frye's timeless essays on Canadian literature and painting.
In this cogent collection of essays written between 1943 and 1969, formidable literary critic and theorist Northrop Frye explores the Canadian imagination through the lens of the country's artistic output: prose, poetry, and paintings. In the collection, Frye offers insightful commentary on the works that shaped a "Canadian sensibility," and includes a comprehensive survey of the landscape of Canadian poetry throughout the 1950s, including astute criticism of the work of E. J. Pratt, Robert Service, Irving Layton, and many others.
Written with clarity and precision, The Bush Garden is a significant cache of literary criticism that traces a pivotal moment in the country's cultural history, and the evolution of Frye's thinking at various stages of his career. These essays are evidence of Frye's brilliance, and cemented his reputation as Canada's -- and the world's -- foremost literary critic.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
6 people are currently reading
90 people want to read
About the author
Northrop Frye
213 books306 followersBorn in Quebec but raised in New Brunswick, Frye studied at the University of Toronto and Victoria University. He was ordained to the ministry of the United Church of Canada and studied at Oxford before returning to UofT.
His first book, Fearful Symmetry, was published in 1947 to international acclaim. Until then, the prophetic poetry of William Blake had long been poorly understood, considered by some to be delusional ramblings. Frye found in it a system of metaphor derived from Paradise Lost and the Bible. His study of Blake's poetry was a major contribution. Moreover, Frye outlined an innovative manner of studying literature that was to deeply influence the study of literature in general. He was a major influence on, among others, Harold Bloom and Margaret Atwood.
In 1974-1975 Frye was the Norton professor at Harvard University.
Frye married Helen Kemp, an educator, editor and artist, in 1937. She died in Australia while accompanying Frye on a lecture tour. Two years after her death in 1986 he married Elizabeth Brown. He died in 1991 and was interred in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, Ontario. The Northrop Frye Centre at Victoria College at the University of Toronto was named in his honour.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop...
His first book, Fearful Symmetry, was published in 1947 to international acclaim. Until then, the prophetic poetry of William Blake had long been poorly understood, considered by some to be delusional ramblings. Frye found in it a system of metaphor derived from Paradise Lost and the Bible. His study of Blake's poetry was a major contribution. Moreover, Frye outlined an innovative manner of studying literature that was to deeply influence the study of literature in general. He was a major influence on, among others, Harold Bloom and Margaret Atwood.
In 1974-1975 Frye was the Norton professor at Harvard University.
Frye married Helen Kemp, an educator, editor and artist, in 1937. She died in Australia while accompanying Frye on a lecture tour. Two years after her death in 1986 he married Elizabeth Brown. He died in 1991 and was interred in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, Ontario. The Northrop Frye Centre at Victoria College at the University of Toronto was named in his honour.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop...
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 3, 2019
"The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination" is a book which in my opinion we could well have done without it. It is a selection of inferior writings that offer little of value and in fact serve to undermine the reputation of one of Canada's great men of letters. The items in this volume should have been left for inclusion in aan academic collection of "complete works". By themselves they constitute a highly unsatisfactory book.
The first half, which is comprised of 10 annual reviews for the decade of the 1950's of Canadian poetry published during the individual years, is particularly grievous. The editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly where the reviews appeared presumably had hoped that Frye's pieces would nurture the writing of poetry in Canada. It is hard to see how they could have served this purpose very well as they are filled with truly savage comments. Of "Love the Conqueror Worm" by Irving Layton, the man that Frye consistently describes as the greatest Canadian poet of the age, Frye writes: "This book consists largely of what we have come to recognize in Laytonese - forced language and flaccid rhythm" (p. 31). Of the rising young star, Leonard Cohen, Frye writes: "The erotic poems follow the usual convention of stacking up thighs like a Rockette chorus line" (p. 66)
The fact that Frye was unquestionably right with every nasty thing he said does redeem the book. He simply should have been less harsh in his criticisms of Canada's overwhelmed and under-talented poets.
The second half of "The Bush Garden" comprised of nine pieces written between 1943 and 1965 on the dominant themes of Canadian literature and their origins is also a failure but at least it fails honorably. Frye presents many of the ideas and elements that his pupil Margaret Atwood would use in her masterful overview of Canadian literature published in 1972 "Survival". Frye describes Canada as having a colonial literature with a garrison mentality. The country is all length with no depth. Canadians are intimidated by their harsh climate. We are English speaking North Americans who perversely rejected the American revolution.
However, perceptive Frye is, he never forms his insight into a coherent thesis and gets himself into logical traps. At one points, he writes: "The Canadian literary mind beginning as it did so late in the cultural history of the West was established on a basis, not of myth, but of history." (p. 231) Unfortunately Frye throughout his career subscribed to Giambattista Vico's view as presented in the "New Science" that all literatures start with the mythic phase. If Frye is being consistent with the rest of his corpus, he is in fact saying that there is no Canadian literary mind and that Canada is simply a geographic entity with a community of writers.
The good spots are few and far between in "The Bush Garden". One seldom sees in it the great critic that Frye was. There are points in it that undoubtedly interest the academic studying Frye, but for the general reader, Frye has written a dozen better books.
The first half, which is comprised of 10 annual reviews for the decade of the 1950's of Canadian poetry published during the individual years, is particularly grievous. The editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly where the reviews appeared presumably had hoped that Frye's pieces would nurture the writing of poetry in Canada. It is hard to see how they could have served this purpose very well as they are filled with truly savage comments. Of "Love the Conqueror Worm" by Irving Layton, the man that Frye consistently describes as the greatest Canadian poet of the age, Frye writes: "This book consists largely of what we have come to recognize in Laytonese - forced language and flaccid rhythm" (p. 31). Of the rising young star, Leonard Cohen, Frye writes: "The erotic poems follow the usual convention of stacking up thighs like a Rockette chorus line" (p. 66)
The fact that Frye was unquestionably right with every nasty thing he said does redeem the book. He simply should have been less harsh in his criticisms of Canada's overwhelmed and under-talented poets.
The second half of "The Bush Garden" comprised of nine pieces written between 1943 and 1965 on the dominant themes of Canadian literature and their origins is also a failure but at least it fails honorably. Frye presents many of the ideas and elements that his pupil Margaret Atwood would use in her masterful overview of Canadian literature published in 1972 "Survival". Frye describes Canada as having a colonial literature with a garrison mentality. The country is all length with no depth. Canadians are intimidated by their harsh climate. We are English speaking North Americans who perversely rejected the American revolution.
However, perceptive Frye is, he never forms his insight into a coherent thesis and gets himself into logical traps. At one points, he writes: "The Canadian literary mind beginning as it did so late in the cultural history of the West was established on a basis, not of myth, but of history." (p. 231) Unfortunately Frye throughout his career subscribed to Giambattista Vico's view as presented in the "New Science" that all literatures start with the mythic phase. If Frye is being consistent with the rest of his corpus, he is in fact saying that there is no Canadian literary mind and that Canada is simply a geographic entity with a community of writers.
The good spots are few and far between in "The Bush Garden". One seldom sees in it the great critic that Frye was. There are points in it that undoubtedly interest the academic studying Frye, but for the general reader, Frye has written a dozen better books.
September 6, 2020
This book is a central text about Canadian literature, poetry in particular. It is also a book about the role of wilderness in the Canadian imagination. Having recently read Roderick Frazier Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind and Oelschlaeger's The Idea of Wilderness I have to say that I am struck by how the Canadian imagination retained the pioneer's attitude to wilderness well into the 20th century. By this I mean that Canadians saw wilderness as a threat, as an obstacle to be overcome in order to survive. (Needless to say, Frye only devotes attention to the English Canadian tradition. He has nothing to say about Indigenous culture on the matter of wilderness and the imagination). There are different, more mature attitudes to wilderness, like those of the Group of Seven and poets like Archibald Lampman, but by and large, men and women of Canadian letters did not follow the American stream of thought led by Emerson, Thoreau, Muir and Leopold. This means that the effort to reconcile the individual and society with nature is a much more new idea in the Canadian imagination. And we do see this quite clearly in how we are still so strongly wedded to resource development and extraction as the primary basis of our economy.
A part of me resists Frye's thesis, however. I feel that in constructing a thesis he might have been a bit too selective in presenting his evidence. Why, for example, is Lampman less important than Earle Birney or Pratt? I suppose that is a naive question, but there must be a reason. The latter two are institutions (and I had never heard of Lampman until reading this book!)
A few comments about Frye's analyses of Canadian painters.
I agree entirely with his assessment of Lawren Harris. Harris strives to create a space between reality and experience in the hope that we will realize the promise of his created worlds (211). Harris is a like a benevolent missionary who goes out into the wilderness not to destroy others' faith, but only "to make his faith real to others" (214).
I am less impressed with Frye's observations about Tom Thomson. Here he is too cursory and selective in his examples. For Frye, Thomson's paintings are primarily about "linear distance" and the foreground is but "a shadowy blur" (203). I can think of many more Thomson paintings that are forest scenes, that some might find claustrophobic. There is no linear distance in these works. They are the views of the hiker in the woods or the canoeist in the swamp. I think of these paintings when I think of Thomson, so I don't really associate linear distance with him.
Finally, this book is crucial to understanding what Frye means by "the Garrison mentality" in Canadian culture. I will not summarize it here. If you've read this far, it means you should read the final essay in the Bush Garden. You'll find it all there.
A part of me resists Frye's thesis, however. I feel that in constructing a thesis he might have been a bit too selective in presenting his evidence. Why, for example, is Lampman less important than Earle Birney or Pratt? I suppose that is a naive question, but there must be a reason. The latter two are institutions (and I had never heard of Lampman until reading this book!)
A few comments about Frye's analyses of Canadian painters.
I agree entirely with his assessment of Lawren Harris. Harris strives to create a space between reality and experience in the hope that we will realize the promise of his created worlds (211). Harris is a like a benevolent missionary who goes out into the wilderness not to destroy others' faith, but only "to make his faith real to others" (214).
I am less impressed with Frye's observations about Tom Thomson. Here he is too cursory and selective in his examples. For Frye, Thomson's paintings are primarily about "linear distance" and the foreground is but "a shadowy blur" (203). I can think of many more Thomson paintings that are forest scenes, that some might find claustrophobic. There is no linear distance in these works. They are the views of the hiker in the woods or the canoeist in the swamp. I think of these paintings when I think of Thomson, so I don't really associate linear distance with him.
Finally, this book is crucial to understanding what Frye means by "the Garrison mentality" in Canadian culture. I will not summarize it here. If you've read this far, it means you should read the final essay in the Bush Garden. You'll find it all there.
May 26, 2022
It is worth saying something about the artistic imagination of Canadians, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the unoriginal attitude they take towards nature. Frye seems to feel that there is some essential difference between Canadians and other English speakers. They are a people apart – isolated, like pioneers or prisoners. Moderns write novels and prose, Canadians write poetry; and nature is constantly sinister and menacing in that poetry. It is taken for granted that Canadian success is related to taming nature, deforestation, railway engineering and settling land. Fear then is a central feature of Canadian literature, fear that if the landscape shapes your alienation, then you must shape it back.
Yet if one looks closely, one sees that there is no essential difference between a Canadian writer’s experience of nature and that of numerous other western writers. Canadian writers contrast their civilized values with the indifference of nature, but then again what writer doesn’t? Writing is a manmade technology. It has always been distinct from nature. A Canadian writer’s relationship with nature isn’t any more unusual than any other nationality just because that relationship is contemplated in the blankness of the snow. It is a literary experience like any other; quite useless of course – but then, many reputable art forms are quite useless. And as products of Burkean values, Anglo-Canadian writers compare quite well with their fellow Anglo nationalists, e.g. the obsession with an expanding economy, the role of cultural production in such an economy, and a desire to say something that people will relate to – in short, an artistic hack, but a fairly harmless hack. They seldom extract more than a bare living from the ‘national’ community, and what justifies them according to our national ideals, is to narrate a cultural ‘unity’ against the fragmentation of experience that the division of labour in this expanding economy naturally produces. I do not think there is anything about an Anglo-Canadian writer that sets him or her apart from American and British writers, despite Canadian claims to see their fellow anglos as non-Canadian "extremes".
Then the question arises, What are Canadian writers for? – for their subjects are not original. I believe for the simple reason that they need to make a decent living, and using Canada as your subject opens up a potential market of over thirty million people. As Frye reminds us, pastoral myths about the land that associate it with the innocence of childhood, will always find a nostalgic audience. In all the talk about respect for peace, order, and good government and the rest of it, what meaning is there except “We are not American’? This has become the grand test of Canadian virtue. By this test Canadian writers fail, because they are indistinguishable from the rest of the anglosphere. As Frye again observes, Franco-Canadian literature is too provincial, and Anglo-Canadian literature is indistinguishable in the world’s lingua franca. Canada, looked at realistically, is both too large and too provincial for any kind of ‘national’ literature.
Perhaps if the world’s second largest country spoke French from coast-to-coast; now that would be a distinctive national identity worth writing about!
Yet if one looks closely, one sees that there is no essential difference between a Canadian writer’s experience of nature and that of numerous other western writers. Canadian writers contrast their civilized values with the indifference of nature, but then again what writer doesn’t? Writing is a manmade technology. It has always been distinct from nature. A Canadian writer’s relationship with nature isn’t any more unusual than any other nationality just because that relationship is contemplated in the blankness of the snow. It is a literary experience like any other; quite useless of course – but then, many reputable art forms are quite useless. And as products of Burkean values, Anglo-Canadian writers compare quite well with their fellow Anglo nationalists, e.g. the obsession with an expanding economy, the role of cultural production in such an economy, and a desire to say something that people will relate to – in short, an artistic hack, but a fairly harmless hack. They seldom extract more than a bare living from the ‘national’ community, and what justifies them according to our national ideals, is to narrate a cultural ‘unity’ against the fragmentation of experience that the division of labour in this expanding economy naturally produces. I do not think there is anything about an Anglo-Canadian writer that sets him or her apart from American and British writers, despite Canadian claims to see their fellow anglos as non-Canadian "extremes".
Then the question arises, What are Canadian writers for? – for their subjects are not original. I believe for the simple reason that they need to make a decent living, and using Canada as your subject opens up a potential market of over thirty million people. As Frye reminds us, pastoral myths about the land that associate it with the innocence of childhood, will always find a nostalgic audience. In all the talk about respect for peace, order, and good government and the rest of it, what meaning is there except “We are not American’? This has become the grand test of Canadian virtue. By this test Canadian writers fail, because they are indistinguishable from the rest of the anglosphere. As Frye again observes, Franco-Canadian literature is too provincial, and Anglo-Canadian literature is indistinguishable in the world’s lingua franca. Canada, looked at realistically, is both too large and too provincial for any kind of ‘national’ literature.
Perhaps if the world’s second largest country spoke French from coast-to-coast; now that would be a distinctive national identity worth writing about!
June 25, 2023
*Disclaimer: I only read the "Conclusion to A Literary History of Canada," since that was the only piece that is relevant to my research.
This conclusion is probably one of the most influential single pieces of critical theory about Anglophone Canadian literature. In it, Frye introduces the theory of the "garrison mentality," which he argues shaped Can lit from its earliest days up through the mid-twentieth century, and even with the shift he posits around the time of WWI the garrison mentality was transformed more than it was necessarily transcended. Basically, the garrison mentality is a kind of claustrophobic attitude typical of frontier writing--the outside world is threatening not just physically but existentially, morally, and psychologically. The garrison stands as the besieged security against the wilderness that at any moment threatens to swallow up the frail human being. And because the garrison is a militarized space, a defensive space, survival within that space necessitates submission to the collective, acceptance of tradition, a kind of ruthless conformity, and (perhaps most important for Canadian letters) a focus on the reality of experience as such. In Frye's reading, these mindsets have limited Canadian authors' creativity, pushing them into spaces where writing is more an expression of reporting than an exploration of the human condition. It is for this reason that Canada had not produced great literary classics.
It is worth noting that this piece has a couple of big limitations from the perspective of 2023. One is that Frye is speaking exclusively of Anglo-Canada. He does acknowledge/gesture towards some connections and divergences with French Canadian literature and their cultural imaginary, but Indigenous people exist in awkward peripheral spaces in Frye's conclusion. Today, when Indigenous voices (along with African, Caribbean, South Asian, East Asian, etc. Canadian voices) are much more prominent in the Canadian literary canon, this perspective needs to be expanded significantly--which I'm sure multiple Can lit scholars have done. Second, this was published originally in 1965, and the state of Canadian letters and the Canadian cultural imaginary has changed significantly since then. And I would argue that Canada has probably produced some great literary classics by now, as well as authors who've written multiple excellent books (something Frye says had rarely if ever happened with Canadian authors by that time).
https://youtu.be/GK7XXTP_8wc
This conclusion is probably one of the most influential single pieces of critical theory about Anglophone Canadian literature. In it, Frye introduces the theory of the "garrison mentality," which he argues shaped Can lit from its earliest days up through the mid-twentieth century, and even with the shift he posits around the time of WWI the garrison mentality was transformed more than it was necessarily transcended. Basically, the garrison mentality is a kind of claustrophobic attitude typical of frontier writing--the outside world is threatening not just physically but existentially, morally, and psychologically. The garrison stands as the besieged security against the wilderness that at any moment threatens to swallow up the frail human being. And because the garrison is a militarized space, a defensive space, survival within that space necessitates submission to the collective, acceptance of tradition, a kind of ruthless conformity, and (perhaps most important for Canadian letters) a focus on the reality of experience as such. In Frye's reading, these mindsets have limited Canadian authors' creativity, pushing them into spaces where writing is more an expression of reporting than an exploration of the human condition. It is for this reason that Canada had not produced great literary classics.
It is worth noting that this piece has a couple of big limitations from the perspective of 2023. One is that Frye is speaking exclusively of Anglo-Canada. He does acknowledge/gesture towards some connections and divergences with French Canadian literature and their cultural imaginary, but Indigenous people exist in awkward peripheral spaces in Frye's conclusion. Today, when Indigenous voices (along with African, Caribbean, South Asian, East Asian, etc. Canadian voices) are much more prominent in the Canadian literary canon, this perspective needs to be expanded significantly--which I'm sure multiple Can lit scholars have done. Second, this was published originally in 1965, and the state of Canadian letters and the Canadian cultural imaginary has changed significantly since then. And I would argue that Canada has probably produced some great literary classics by now, as well as authors who've written multiple excellent books (something Frye says had rarely if ever happened with Canadian authors by that time).
https://youtu.be/GK7XXTP_8wc
August 16, 2020
“There is the vast hinterland of the north, with its sense of mystery and fear of the unknown, and the curious guilt feeling that its uninhabited loneliness seems to inspire in this exploiting age. If the Canadian faces south, he becomes either hypnotised or repelled by the United States: either he tries to think up unconvincing reasons for being different and somehow superior to Americans, or he accepts being “swallowed up by” the United States as inevitable.”
February 6, 2025
OMG! What a marvelous piece of work!
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September 29, 2010I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. Being born after 1970, I don’t find the Canadian poetry section covering 1950-1959 particularly interesting and I’m not sure that if Frye were alive today that he would find it interesting either. This section lasts until page 130 and the book is only 256 pages long. There are some really awesome paragraphs every three years, but that’s not really enough. I didn’t think that the book would turn around for me and it didn’t’ really until I had finally finished it. It was an epic journey and only the way Northrop Frye pieces things together makes it that way. I haven’t read much Frye, but I don’t know if many of his other works took such painstaking work and documentation to assemble.
October 7, 2011
I read this book quite a long time ago as part of a course on CanLit and poetry. I love the way Frye uses language to express ideas, and ideas to create/curate identity... and rereading this book makes me want to go back and reread Anatomy of Criticism and Fearful Symmetry, as well as Atwood, McLuhan, Innis, Lampman, Birney etc etc... if you are Canadian and you like poetry, you should read this book because it might introduce you to a previous generation of Canadian romanticism or a previous previous generation of Canadian classicism.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews