Spiritual Mundi
Frye, Northrop
nonetheless with an endorsement of Eisenhower; he published Essays in the Public Philosophy which, to the consternation of his old intellectual comrades, affirmed the existence of God and...
...No one who writes English prose as well as Frye does is writing anything but literature...
...This can mean the personal dependence on a poet rather than another critic...
...While Lippmann's writings cannot be looked upon as oracular, they deserve attention from those who would take part in public discourse, and especially the younger generation that missed Lippmann the first time around...
...The second group of four essays, "The Mythological Universe," is perhaps the most tightly unified...
...28 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1977...
...Apparently Frye is closer to T.S...
...The two autobiographical essays alone, with their comprehensive and witty grasp of the world of literature in its relation to the worlds of academe, politics, morals, religion, and myth, make it clear that an attempt to distinguish between literature and criticism at this level is to miss the point of both...
...My guess is that most people who read this book will be most interested in the John P. Sisk is professor of English at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash...
...tinctions, separating, for instance, new...
...Lippmann passed on to graceful old age and death without gaining a cult following...
...that despite his antagonism to the Vietnam war and to racism, he had little sympathy for the activism of the late sixties and early seventies...
...Nevertheless, these essays include items of considerable interest for the student of Frye's work, if not for the biographer that may never be: that a Maoist pamphlet once described him "as the high priest of obscurantism...
...Indeed, as Frye says, "there is always a sense in which criticism is a form of autobiography," and one of the most important revelations the critic-autobiographer can make is that of the guru or spiritual preceptor to whom his criticism is at least implicitly dedicated...
...It brings together what might appear at first glance to be an unlikely combination of subjects: Blake, Sir James Frazer, charms, riddles, Darwin, the Elizabethan masque and antimasque, Old and New comedy, and Spengler's Decline of the West...
...The former he saw as the signalizing of events (or worse, sometimes, the telling of hearsay), while the latter was approached by analyzing both deeds and ideas...
...He made dis...
...He had won his lifelong struggle against fitting the neat ideological patterns...
...Walter Lippmann's Public Persons may lack some of the colo~ of anecdotal writing, but it is a refreshing break from the dressed-up gossip that struts about today and calls itselt journalism...
...that "the voice of music" is central to his conception of literature...
...Beginning as a rhapsody to Eugene McCarthy, whose challenge to President Johnson's Vietnam policy Lippmann admired, it ends with the hope that the Johnson administration "be ousted by a rejuvenated Republican party...
...In one neat sentence he can throw unexpected light around a subject, as here: "Waiting for Godot is also, in one of its aspects, a parody of the vaudeville dialogues, the long shapeless rigmaroles which used to be packed around the 'feature film' of my youth...
...from truth...
...Contexts of Literature," the first four essays, is largely concerned with the nature of the university, the threats to its proper function, the place of the humanities in relation to the sciences and the social sciences, and the nature of the changing vision of the universe in which the university exists...
...Certainly he has done his share to make it harder to think this way...
...that he has an introverted temperament and indolent habits...
...He wrote clean prose without glitter or fuzz...
...that he went through a long period of neurotic fear of being confronted with proof that his publications had been plagiarized from work he had either not read or had forgotten...
...It would be illuminating to read Lippmann's assessment of Stalin or Taft or Eisenhower or McCarthy, but no such assessments are collected in Public Persons...
...The tripartite grouping of the essays in this collection is, nevertheless, structurally important and is, no doubt, an indication of the best way to read the book...
...Frye remarks in this splendid essay how easy it still is to think of literary scholarship and criticism "as somehow sub-creative, in contrast to the 'creative' writing of poems and novels, as though creativity were an attribute of those genres rather than of the people using them...
...however, it can also mean the personal apprenticeship of a poet to a guru poet, so that both critic and poet find their own voices in an organic tradition...
...In the third section Frye takes on Milton's Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, Blake's illustrations for The Book of Job, Yeats' A Vision, and Wallace Stevens' letters and Opus Posthumous...
...that when he published his study of Blake thirty years ago he knew nothing of myth criticism...
...The two-party system as Lippmann envisioned it was an instrument of conscience...
...Eliot than to Harold Bloom, even though the latter's "anxiety of influence" may make him as much a loner as Frye claims to be...
...When such clarities are in abundance I can easily forgive him for devoting an entire essay to Yeats' A Vision --a work which, he confesses, "baffled and exasperated him for many years," and which continues to baffle and exasperate me even after he has written about it...
...Above all he respected the privacy of public persons...
...that he is puzzled by the fact that Spengler, a writer antipathetic to him, has had such a formative influence on his thinking...
...The really startling thing would be twelve essays by Frye that failed to convey a unity of theme and tone regardless of the order in which they were read...
...0Q~000000I0BOIIg0BB0O0gQ*0BgO0OQQOjQ000iQge0QQQ0I~0AQ0Uo00QQD000I0Q0Q0Q0IQgQQ0OIO0QOIiaOIgOIQ00QDgoDIQg0OQ0QO~0I000DIg6OigQ~QjQQQ0Qm0~QQ00 BD000O0guI BOOK REVIEW Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society Northrop Frye / Indiana University Press / $11.50 John P. Sisk Spiritus Mundi, a gathering together of twelve of Northrop Frye's most recent essays, comes with the author's promise that the individual pieces, despite differences of occasion and time of composition, "possess a unity and can be read consecutively...
...A true specimen of Lippmann's independence is the book's last essay...
...he published Essays in the Public Philosophy which, to the consternation of his old intellectual comrades, affirmed the existence of God and presented a case for natural law...
...introductory essays of the first two sections, which, says Frye, "might be described as autobiographical...
...Or here: "Nothing happens in Plato until one person, generally Socrates, assumes control of the argument and the contributions of the others are largely reduced to punctuation...
...But here readers who have learned from Frye to think of autobiography as a form of fiction may need Frye's own caveat: "I have unconsciously arranged my life so that nothing has ever happened to me, and no biographer could possibly take the smallest interest in me...
...The preceptor-apprentice relationship is developed in "Expanding Eyes," which may be read as the apologia of one of our most important critics...
...Of course, authors always say this about their collected pieces: who wants to believe that his incidental figures, however put together, do not make a whole carpet...
Vol. 10 • May 1977 • No. 8
