Anatomy of Criticism Quotes

“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.”
― Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

“A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory.”
― Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

“Literature, like mathematics, is a language, and a language in itself represents no truth, though it may provide the means for expressing any number of them. But poets and critics alike have always believed in some kind of imaginative truth, and perhaps the justification for the belief is in the containment by the language of what it can express.”
― Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

“Honest critics are continually finding blind spots in their taste: they discover the possibility of recognizing a valid form of poetic experience without being able to realize it for themselves.”
― Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

“We then discover that we have no word, corresponding to “poem” in poetry or “play” in drama, to describe a work of literary art. It is all very well for Blake to say that to generalize is to be an idiot, but when we find ourselves in the cultural situation of savages who have words for ash and willow and no word for tree, we wonder if there is not such a thing as being too deficient in the capacity to generalize.”
― Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays

“But it is not easy to find any language capable of expressing the unity of this higher intellectual universe, Metaphysics, theology, history, law, have all been used, but all are verbal constructs, and the further we take them, the more clearly their metaphorical and mythical outlines show through. Whenever we construct a system of thought to unite earth with heaven, the story of the Tower of Babel recurs: we discover that after all we can’t quite make it, and that what we have in the meantime is a plurality of languages.”
― Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

“Anyone measuring his mind against an external reality has to fall back on an axiom of faith.”
― Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

“W e should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there.”
― Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

“All other statements of intention, however fully documented, are suspect. The poet may change his mind or mood; he may have intended one thing and done another, and then rationalised what he did.”
― Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

“Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or, in practice, to our memory of the conventional association between them. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make.”
― Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism