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by a critical revolution of another sort . And if the convenient simplifications
of literary history now suggest that it was the criticism of Eliot which played
the most significant role in this revaluation of Donne, the literary historian
of another twenty years will probably isolate Northrop Frye as the figure
whose criticism was most instrumental in advancing Blake to a position of
extraordinary prominence during our own time .
By this I don't at all mean to evoke echoes of what Frye himself has
called " the literary chit-chat which makes the reputations of poets boom
and crash in an imaginary stock exchange." But I do think it's worth asking
whether we've been sufficiently alert to the way certain poets have func–
tioned as vehicles-Donne and the Metaphysicals in the twenties, Words–
worth during the high Victorian period, Spenser and Chaucer in the mid–
eighteenth century-for cultural visions which haven't been nearly the
disinterested gestures of applied criticism their initial proponents evidently
thought they were.
I raise the issue because of Blake's unique status in such a context.
Whatever else one can say about him-and lately one has
to
struggle against
the suspicion that everything sensible about him has already been said–
Blake remains the Great Outsider of literary studies: the figure whose abili–
ties far surpass those of any other poet denied an audience in his own life–
time . Hence the effort that Frye began so brilliantly in 1947 with his
Fearful
Symmetry-to
demonstrate a recognizable literary tradition into which
Blake could fit-takes on a peculiar suggestiveness when we consider how
much the social thrust of literary studies during the quarter-century that
followed the Second War was an enormous cultural analogue
to
Frye's great
effort . Indeed, to quote from the theoretical nakedness of Frye's own
Anatomy
(which appeared exactly a decade after
Fearful Symmetry):
"No
discussion of beauty can confine itself to the formal relations of the isolated
work of art; it must consider, too, the participation of the work of art in the
vision of the goal of social effort, the idea of complete and classless civili–
zation ."
I don't think I have to stress how this ideal of "participation" was an
important consideration for many of us who chose the teaching of English
as a profession in the 1950s and 60s . Our goal was, of course, to introduce
an entire generation of college students, through the medium of literary
studies,
to
a conception of culture far different from the prevailing values
of the society in which we found ourselves . And however much there may
have been of an aggressive elitism lurking in our enterprise, there was also
a genuine communal faith that every student who entered our classroom
had the potential to be transformed into a new kind of reader, one who
