One of the most distinguished literary critics of the twentieth century, Northrop Frye spent his entire career based at Victoria College. The Library owns a comprehensive collection of his published work, literary manuscripts, correspondence, and personal and professional writings, together with photographs and audiovisual materials, a small selection from which is displayed here, including three annotated texts and one essay. His annotations are by turns funny, sardonic, insightful, and tender. The essay dates from 1933, the year he completed his honours degree in Philosophy and English at Victoria College.
The left-hand page contains the last stanza of the “Ode on Melancholy.” Frye writes: “The greatest of the odes, I think. Certainly the clearest statement of the romantic agony.” On the right is the beginning of "Hyperion: A Fragment." Above the title, Frye writes: “E. [Keats's Endymion] deals with the poet as eros & Adonis and is Spenserian; H. ["Hyperion"] with the poet as logos or Son of God (H. is both father & Lucifer) & is Miltonic. Defeat of organized religion by poetry is the general idea.”
John Keats. Poetical Works. Ed. H. Buxton Forman.
London: Oxford University Press, 1937.
Commenting on Biographia Literaria, Frye writes, for example, “C. constantly befogged by the compulsion to define a poem in terms of a good poem—‘poem worthy the name of poem’—that sort of nonsense”; "prudery is not the determinant of criticism, but wouldn’t it be nice if it were?” and “every hunk of rhyme or measure’s offered as a poem: only metrical analysis can determine whether it hangs together.”
S. T. Coleridge. Selected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Stephen Potter.
London: Nonesuch Press, 1950.
Frye’s annotation reads: “not science fiction of course but the world’s first existential thriller in the line of Camus’ L’Etranger. “
Mary Shelley. Frankenstein.
New York: Pyramid Books, 1957.
Frye’s annotation reads: “not science fiction of course but the world’s first existential thriller in the line of Camus’ L’Etranger. “
Mary Shelley. Frankenstein.
New York: Pyramid Books, 1957.
The MS note on the cover of the typed essay addressed to Professor Brett reads as follows: “The first part of this essay deals with the general definition, concepts and features of romanticism, the second part with romantic philosophy, the third with romantic music, the fourth romanticism in English literature and the conclusion indicates its general trend in politics. I have not had time to deal with the painting or with continental literature. I hope that the inordinate length of the essay will prove to be as necessary an evil as it is an un-mitigated one. Romanticism being a cultural phenomenon, the centre of gravity of this essay lies in the realm of aesthetics.”
1933 essay by Northrop Frye entitled “Romanticism.”
