Northrop Frye : A Biography

Herman Northrop Frye, literary critic, university professor, editor (b at Sherbrooke, Qué 14 Jul 1912; d at Toronto 23 Jan 1991). A professor of English at Victoria College at the University of Toronto since 1939, Frye achieved international recognition for his literary theories, expounded in his study of William Blake's prophecies, Fearful Symmetry (1947), his grammar of mythic form, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), and his 2-volume study of how the Bible provided the symbolic underpinnings of Western literature, The Great Code (1982). These works, particularly Anatomy, made Frye one of this century's leading literary theorists and resulted in his receiving honorary degrees from many of the major universities in the Western world.
Raised in Moncton, Frye first came to Toronto in 1929. He enrolled at Victoria College and, except for 2 years of study at Merton College in Oxford, he remained associated with the college throughout his life, becoming chancellor in 1978. While a graduate student, Frye decided to write a definitive study of Blake's prophetic poems, then considered incoherent, even aberrant. In Fearful Symmetry, Frye showed that Blake deliberately used a regular pattern of symbolism which reflected Milton and ultimately on the Bible. In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye expanded this idea by outlining a verbal universe of repeated archetypes and symbolism and rhetoric that binds all literature together.
Frye's impact was strongest in the mid-1960s, when a new generation of American scholars, notably Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman, were influenced by the ideas of Anatomy. The prestige of Frye's thinking also reinforced a significant mythic trend in Canadian poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the work of such former students as Jay Macpherson, James Reaney and Margaret Atwood.