Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake by Northrop Frye

Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake Reviews

• 
  Fergus, Quondam Happy Face

  TANGLED IN THE FALLEN VINES -
  PICKIN’ UP THE PUNCH LINES -
  I KNOW I’M FAKING IT!
  Simon & Garfunkel
  
  This book - Frye’s first, the one which cemented his worldwide following - is based on a well-oiled lie. Frye says Blake was decidedly not a madman. Baloney. He had his embarrassing episodes as I have had mine.
  
  I know, know - it’s a fine line between insanity and Gnosticism - but those empowered by Enoch’s myth of the Race of Giants err greatly in all things religious. And Frye is no exception. Bipolars are naive; Gnostics are Politely Pharasaical.
  
  In such a way, the well-oiled clockwork bedevilment of Academic Gnosticism catapulted a young dropout of the Protestant Cloth to his great Wool-Gathering Glory in this revolutionary 1950’s book...
  
  And sunk my own contrariously struggling soul - till, smothered in the smoke and tangled in the fallen vines of my anguished struggle through my Freshman and Junior Uni Years, I fell into dreary disrepute.
  
  If you buy this one, caveat emptor.
  
  This brand of criticism FAKES its way through the Classics, rather than LIVING ‘em with its Heart! Frye suffers from a dry academic dearth of heartfelt emotion.
  
  When I turned twenty, before my Sophomore Year - I girded my loins for combat - a young, green Sir Gawain, preparing to face my dreaded nemeses, the well-oiled Green Knights, as in the medieval Poetic Work.
  
  Yes, they’re oily, these Green Knights of Gnosticism.
  
  May as well take up your sword against the very Wind! Is there any hope for us hapless, well-meaning Believers in a Higher Purpose, against a clamouring and rowdy too-Green World?
  
  Yes, says Karl Barth - but FIRST we must ‘reduce’ or concentrate our faith, as we would stir and reduce a culinary sauce over low heat so it gains more solidity, in the forge of sober postmodernism - and then Act wisely.
  
  Seeing faith as a no-frills and absurdly Quixotic fight which tries to ground goodness in the raging river of gnostic permissiveness. And still believing. Seeing its Absurdity, yes, but KNOWING that such combat is mandatory.
  
  Then, and only then, will we hold our tongues and find a modicum of Grace in the onslaught.
  
  For it is only after a prolonged stretch of alternation between moments of peace and rest, and the arduous work of putting our shoulder to the sword or to the ploughshare that we find real hope.
  
  Life’s not fair, but it’s good.
  
  To see that we must clamber up to the eagle’s-eye vantage point of our Creator, who sees the good that is in BOTH sides of the struggle.
  
  Northrop Frye may have been partial to hidden meanings in literature, as are all Gnostics, but he - like us - must pay the consequences of our Promethean Theft of Fire from Heaven.
  
  Why?
  
  Blake himself sums it up. The transition into culpability is our own coming of age from Innocence to Experience. Culpability and innocence - shade and light.
  
  Neither from nor toward -
  There the dance is...
  
  And ALL Blake’s work REALLY indicates he chose to plea for innocence -
  
  Over jaded experience -
  
  At a far remove from the knowingly “Experienced” Gnostic Mindset:
  
  And NOT falling into the trap of “easy” Gnosticism!
  
  For Blake preached not gnostic faith, but the Process of Becoming Fully Human. Even - yes - if madness bars your way. As it did Blake’s.
  
  You know, our full humanity - taking the good and the bad of ourselves, and moulding it into a Christian soul in the forge of attentive faith - overrides the gnostic heresy any day.
  
  From which heretics, catching the scent of integrity, are forced to flee.
  
  For it is made of Faith in the Incarnation, which they reject. Becoming a hard-knocks-embracing human follower of the Lord, you become their nemesis.
  
  No, Northrop, I regret to disagree, but what Blake was REALLY selling was the Human Truth of Religious Thinking and NOT mere myth and deceit.
  
  For, in the end, we ALL pay the full price for the gift of experience -
  
  Right down to the last Purgatorial Jot and Tittle -
  
  Including, my dear Northrop, Gnostic Giants such as yourself.
• 
  Josh

  Well... this book is alternately fascinating and frustrating, a long, discursive summary of "Blake's thought" as Frye sees it. Because of how labrynthine and involuted Blake's writing was - especially in the prophetic books - there are necessarily quite a few 25-30 page sections of pure summary, things like "Urothria is the son of Spooptapulus, wife of Borg, which means that the artistic imagination reigns supreme in the third dyad, blah blah blah." I just made those names up, but I'm going to guess that the effect of them is about the same as the effect of Blake's real counters on someone (like me) who hasn't read the thousands of pages of poetry/myth that Frye is describing. In other words, ka-what?
  
  However, once Frye has laid the pieces in front of you, his hands are free for some amazing analysis. Essentially, he suggests that Blake's mythology illuminates a pattern that is repeated, not just in a few other world mythologies, but in all of them. So a close reading of Blake's canon provides a blueprint of the creative imagination.
  
  Frye is a fantastic writer. Some of his statements are so fluent and persuasive that I almost forgot that I was studying Blake: after a certain point I was much more interested in what Frye's anatomizing intelligence could tell me about how poetry is made.
  
  I don't know who I'd recommend this book too. Probably people with patience and a strong strain of intellectual masochism.
• 
  Czarny Pies

  Fearful Symmetry is one of the most important works of 20th century English criticism and deserves the widest audience possible. Being the key work of Northrop Frye it must be read by anyone truly committed to understanding him. While Frye has written many other outstanding books, none contain such a complete and cogently argued statement of Frye's ideas.
  Fearful Symmetry accomplishes two important things: (a) it explains why the Bible is the "Great Code" of English literature and (b): it explains William Blake's key role in the elaboration of an English mythopeoia.
  In Blake's view the key function of art (p. 357) was is to tell the Biblical drama of :
  1. Man's Fall
  2. Struggle of Man in a Fallen World
  3. Redemption
  4. The Apocalypse
  Artists must be visionaries like Christ's apostles and create works that allow men and women to perceive God. "Art, because it affords a systematic training in [divine] vision, is the medium through which religion is revealed. The Bible is the vehicle of revealed religion because its a unified vision of human life and therefore as Blake says : 'the Great Code of Art.'" (p. 45)
  Through art one approaches the divine: "The place of honour in art goes to the artist who has passed through religion and come out the other side. Such an artist, in Blake's symbolism ... through the ring of fire into Eden where man is no longer a creature but a creator and is one with God." (p. 345)
  In Frye's view the England's mythopoetic tradition was founded by Spencer who combined symbols from Arthurian tales, popular superstition and Biblical images in his epic the Faerie Queene. Spencer was able to what he did because he lived in the era when the religious capital of England had been moved from Rome to London where it was united with the political capital.
  The puritan Milton brilliantly advances the tradition with his epic of the fall and redemption makes heavy use of Greek classical mythology. Milton presents Satan as being passive and unable to perceive the divine.
  Blake who followed Milton felt that the greatest sin was passivity. Christ's followers must active visionaries endeavouring to perceive God. Priggish morality becomes evil. Blake adds elements from the islandic Edda to the English mythopoetic mix.
  In Frye's view, after Blake English literature fell into a decadent phase as Deism and romanticism pushed the heroic English Mythopoetic tradition off stage.
  Many people in this century feel that Tolkien with the Lord of the Rings revived the English Mythopoetic tradition adding the Finish Kalevala to it. However there seems to be no way of knowing what Frye would have thought of this hypothesis. Fearful Symmetry was published before the Tolkien cycle. While Frye is known to have read the Lord of the Rings he made no public comment about it. Nonetheless, the combination of elements from English folklore, the Edda, and Bible found in Tolkien's work make it difficult to see the Lord of the Rings as anything else but a part of the tradition of Spencer, Milton and Blake.
  One also feels that Blake's synthesis of various mythologies and his expressed belief that there this is "only one language and one religion" are consistent with those of Joseph Campbell who created the model for the on-going Star Wars saga. If popular culture counts, Blake's vision is more popular than it ever has been.
  
  
• 
  Ilya

  I am not embarrassed to admit that, on first encounter, I found Blake’s prophetic poetry (especially, “The Four Zoas,” “Milton” and “Jerusalem”) entirely unapproachable and downright impossible. For that matter, the much-celebrated and more straightforward “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience” are also far richer and more complex than they first appear. But the prophetic writings are something else altogether: the strangeness, the density of the symbols, the bizarre mythology, the irregular punctuation and versification are all there at once, and they overwhelm quickly. Even good annotations, such as those in the Penguin Classics edition, can only do so much. So, I cast around for help, and that is how I discovered Northrop Frye’s “Fearful Symmetry.” Indeed, “discovery” won’t do; Frye is a revelation. Rather than cracking some non-existing code, the study methodically illuminates every sinew and joint of each poem, producing in the end a single, unified vision of Blake’s poetic imagination. And as he does so, Frye delivers some of the most brilliant scriptural exegesis I have come across. For anyone with any interest in Blake’s poetry (not biography) beyond the “Tyger,” Frye is indispensable.
• 
  James

  One of the two seminal works on Blake in the twentieth century, the second being Erdman's Prophet Against Empire. Frye's study of Blake led to his Anatomy of Criticism, a defining work within literary criticism in English. Frye's work is a study of Blake's symbols, approaching Blake's work as myth (as opposed to Erdman's, who reads Blake's work historically). It's still an excellent work for someone first venturing in to Blake's labyrinthine prophet works.
• 
  Saul

  
  
  This is a monumental book. It took 120 years for him to arrive, but Frye is the critic that Blake deserves, balancing careful scholarly analysis with imaginative poetic descriptions of his own. It's even more remarkable that this was his first book.
  
  I have to admit this took a long time to read, but it was worth it. The first hurdle was getting acclimatized to Blake's theory of knowledge, which is central to his whole project. It is a radical idealism that is first stated rather abstractly, but begins to make more sense once it is examined in the context of art, science, religion, and politics. In short, it is an extreme "literalism of the imagination". The word "imagination" can sound a bit flat to modern ears -- "vision" is pretty much synonymous to Blake and carries more of the power that he intended.
  
  Before reading this book I had read Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry". It makes the bold argument that imaginative art precedes science (and everything else):
  
  

  
  Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life.
  

  
  
  But Blake takes this to the extreme, and elevates it to the level of a metaphysical system. The craziest part is that you actually start to believe it (even if you're terminally STEMbrained like me).
  
  I was intrigued throughout by Blake's views on religion. It's clear he was a very "religious" man in some sense, but he was also quite hostile to orthodox theology. His "infernal or diabolical" reading of the Bible is compelling, and is certainly a hermeneutic with the full force of a powerful imagination behind it. I'm sure most orthodox-minded people would find Blake's theology scandalous, but I have the sense the broader view of it is pretty compatible with certain traditions (Eastern Orthodoxy for example), though I'm not a theologian. My intuition tells me that Blake's thought is most closely aligned with some sort of Whiteheadian Christian Panentheism (someone should write an essay on that).
  
  But this is ultimately just speculation. What really matters is Blake's poetry and art. If you want to get a sense of what Blake believed, you can get it from the man himself. From a letter to a friend:
  
  

  
  [...] And now let me finish with assuring you that, though I have been very unhappy, I am so no longer. I am again emerged into the light of day; I still and shall to eternity embrace Christianity, and adore Him who is the express image of God; but I have travelled through perils and darkness not unlike a champion. I have conquered, and shall go on conquering. Nothing can withstand the fury of my course among the stars of God and in the abysses of the accuser. My enthusiasm is still what it was, only enlarged and confirmed.
  

  
  
  As you can see from the above quote and from practically anything he wrote or created, Blake brought an almost frightening intensity to everything he did. You really get the sense that his entire life was an intellectual and spiritual war waged on multiple fronts. He truly lived the life of a prophet, being neglected and ridiculed for his entire career, yet still dedicating it all to producing a canon of some of the most visionary and eternally relevant art and poetry in our culture.
  
  I am excited to continue working through Blake's complete works with the foundation I now have from Frye. I can already feel my imaginative capabilities slowly growing. I no longer see the Guinea-Sun, but something far more strange and beautiful.
• 
  Mary Overton

  "There is only one false religion as there is only one true one; and it has two infallible marks. First, it postulates some kind of God who is unknown and mysterious because he is not inside us but somewhere else: where, only God knows. Second, it preaches submission, acceptance and unquestioning obedience. The sting is in the tail. Religion of this kind being invented only to buttress the status quo, it is always 'State Religion, which is the source of all Cruelty.'....
  "In the unfallen world objects of perception are alive and intelligent; and a faint echo of the animation of that world survives in the animism of primitive religion. The nymphs, satyrs and fauns of Classical mythology are older and more authentic than the Olympian hierarchy. With the separation of existence and perception, however, the natural object became attached to the latter and its spirit or Genius to the former, so that gradually a belief in invisible deities grew up. The eleventh plate of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the paragraph beginning 'The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses,' traces this process with a clarity that might impress even a modern student of the subject. In the later poems Blake contrasts the 'fairies' of the more original belief with the 'heathen gods' who succeeded them. These gods were invariably selfish and cruel, as a God whose interests do not run counter to those of man cannot be invoked in support of a tyranny. Ovid shows them particularly interested in stifling and suppressing the artists who attempted to rival them (i.e., create better gods), as in the stories of Marsyas and Arachne." pp. 60-61
  
  "... art is neither inferior nor equal to morality and truth, but the synthesis of civilized life in which alone their general laws have any real meaning. Art is neither good nor bad, but a clairvoyant vision of the nature of both.... Art is neither true nor false, but a clairvoyant vision of the nature of both....
  "....
  "Now just as the poet is brought up to speak and write one particular language, so he is brought up in the traditions of one particular religion. And his function as a poet is to concentrate on the myths of that religion, and to recreate the original imaginative life of those myths by transforming them into unique works of art. The essential truth of a religion can be presented only in its essential form, which is that of imaginative vision....
  "The artist qua artist neither doubts nor believes his religion: he sees what it means, and he knows how to illustrate it. His religion performs two great services for him. It provides him with a generally understood body of symbols, and it puts into his hands the visionary masterpieces on which it is founded: the Bible particularly, in the case of Christian poets. Many of these latter have petrified into sacred Scriptures supposed now to impart exclusive formulas of salvation rather than vision. It is the business of a poet, however, to see them as poems, and base his own poetry on them as such." pp. 117-119
• 
  Austin

  Utterly life-changing book. Starting over right as I finish.
• 
  Anima

  "Cosmology is a literary art, but there are two kinds of cosmology, the kind designed to understand the world as it is, and the kind designed to transform it into the form of human desire. Platonists and occultists deal with the former kind...
  Cosmology of this type is speculative, which(..) is ultimately intellectual narcism, staring into nature as the mirror of our ordinary selves.
  What the mirror shows us is what Blake calls “mathematic form,” the automatic and mindless universe that has no beginning nor end, no up nor down. What such a universe suggests to us is resignation, acceptance of what is, approval of what is predictable, fear of whatever is unpredictable.
  Blake’s cosmology, of which the symbol is Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot of God with its “wheels within wheels,” is a revolutionary vision of the universe transformed by the creative imagination into a human shape.
  .....
  ....I wrote Fearful Symmetry during the Second World War, and hideous as that time was, it provided some parallels with Blake’s time which were useful for understanding Blake’s attitude to the world. Today, now that reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerfully in Jerusalem, one of the most hopeful signs is the immensely increased sense of the urgency and immediacy of what Blake had to say. "
  NORTHROP FRYE
• 
  Will Lashley

  A reference today to a guinea coin made me return to this book and I realised I have never recommended it on Goodreads, a serious omission as it is one of the most formative books I have ever read. Reading William Blake's longer poems like "The Four Zoas" or the earlier prophetic books can be daunting. To immerse yourself in Blake's cosmology requires grasping and reinterpreting not just the classical and Biblical references but Blake's more contemporary influences such as the mystics Emmanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme and especially the English poet he most admired and resisted, John Milton. Northrop Frye published "Fearful Symmetry" in 1947, his first book, and it really foreshadows his lifelong work to create a critical tradition that magnifies the breadth of Western literature by restoring the mythological grounding and investing that with modern psychological insights. Criticism needed to entail both structural and narrative insights and historical comparisons but it also demanded daring leaps of poetic inspiration and metaphorical transformation. While “Fearful Symmetry” is not composed or strictly intended as a "key" to Blake, it gives you a glimpse of the Blakean Vision. Northrup takes the more straightforward and well known body of Blake's poems like the "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" and uses these as a starting point to explain the oppositions that figure the unity of Blake's liberating "System", challenging the reader to look through the Eye and frame for himself "thy fearful symmetry", and in doing so gives the reader hope to see the scope of Blake's imagination by being faithful to his own. Blending an analysis and defence of the artwork of the "madman" and printer of Lambeth with his illuminated words, Northrop Frye restored William Blake to the canon of great English Romantic Poets by demonstrating that his "insanity" was a revolt against the cruelty and arid rationalism of his time. Blake's art was a refuge from insanity, not an idiosyncratic retreat into it. Frye's book is really indispensable, not only as a guide but as a classic in itself.
• 
  John

  Don't let anyone tell you that you'll never read one of the books that has sat for decades on your shelves unread. I'm now reading Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry, a study of William Blake's poerty, the very same copy that I bought about 40 years ago, and have been lugging about for just as long in the clear and unremitting anticipation that one day I would actually read it. And so I am. I'll report later whether it was worth the wait.
• 
  Peter

  This is a profound work of criticism, the subject being the life work of William Blake. It's very unusual in its poetic and visionary content. This is a very far out book, which altered my conceptions of Blake, as well as the Bible, and world history.
• 
  Gabriel

  Northrop Frye is one of those amazing literary critics no one's ever heard of. I first discovered him when handed a collection of lectures he gave on canadian radio. This is a very astute reading of Blake.
• 
  Zachary Martin

  An excellent book about Blake's theories and concerns. If your thinking about trying to make sense of his intense poetic visions, this is a good place to start.
  
• 
  Steve Chisnell

  This is truly an extraordinary piece of scholarship, denied 5 stars only by its inconstant compulsion to be read. It was Frye's first book (the beginning of an amazing career), but designed more for his studies than for me. Nevertheless, his thorough and groundbreaking analysis of Blake's cosmogony did wonders to certify some "imagination" I had about a world of reason, but it did so with an eloquence that I could never have summoned on my own while opening up some of the limitations of thinking and theory at the time (1947). I can never read "The Tyger" again the same way, nor dare I approach the single works of other writers so cavalierly.
  
  There is little point in attempting to summarize Frye's interp of Blake here in the brief space; rather it is incumbent upon my own creations to enact a response to it and to do justice to the imagination. What Blake has done for me most of all is help me capture--through his own understanding of allegory--my need to resist the mills.
• 
  Keith

  As I said about in my review of William Blake's works, there is an audience for this but it's not me. If you are interested in literary criticism, 18th century philosophy, and the unusual cosmology/mythology of Blake, this is the ideal book for you. If not, then you may want to dip into this book as you read works by Blake. That's what I'm doing and Frye provides as lucid an introduction as is possible for Blake.
• 
  Harry

  Essential criticism for anyone interested in Blake's work, especially his prophetic books. You need to go into this with a decent understanding of not only The Bible but of, Swedenborg, Newton, Milton, Locke, Bacon and the political and historical events of the time.
• 
  Kit

  Heavy-duty humanities. I had to press pause on this one. Maybe I will come back after finishing the Bible, and Blake. I'm very impressed by Frye's erudition. They don't write em' like this anymore, perhaps because no one is well-read enough.
• 
  Alan Lindsay

  Dense, but that is not a criticism. I will need to reread it after I reread all of Blake.
• 
  Flynn William

  Active imagination, free handed use of Biblical material, a hearty taste for self-canonisation: Northrop Frye and William Blake are visionaries and gentleman. Really pleased to have read this book.
• 
  Auntjenny

  I used this book in college to write my senior thesis about Blake's portrayal of women in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Songs of Innocence and Experience, and The Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Honestly, my paper was pretty god awful, I think. I wish someone would have told me that. Instead, I got an A I believe. Anywho, that's my story. (P.S. Blake was kind of crappy toward women, like just about every one of his contemporaries.)
• 
  P. Wilson

  This is quite a book, and one that you wade through the first time, and go back to a second. Frye's first major work of criticism, it rescued the poetry of William Blake from allegations of obscurity. As someone who reads, writes and enjoys paranormal literature, I was fascinated by Blake's idea that all languages and religions have their roots in a primordial myth. Rich stuff to play around with!
• 
  Stephen

  I'm always returning to this book in conjunction with reading William Blake. I'd love to contact my old college prof and ask if he would please send me a copy of his notes on the class he taught on Blake and Whitman.
• 
  John

  best book i have read about Blake
• 
  Peter

  Among the three books of prose about poetry essential to me.
• 
  Tina Romanelli

  Love it! Frye is brilliant in his specific criticism.
• 
  Dan

  Acquired 1986
  The Word, Montreal, Quebec