Posts Tagged ‘Northrop Frye’
Quote of the Day
The unity of a work of art, the basis of structural analysis, has not been produced solely by the unconditioned will of the artist, for the artist is only its efficient cause: it has form, and consequently a formal cause. The fact that revision is possible, that the poet makes changes not because he likes them better but because they are better, means that poems, like poets, are born and not made. The poet’s task is to deliver the poem in as uninjured a state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from his private memories and associations, his desire for self-expression, and all the other navel-strings and feeding tubes of his ego. The critic takes over where the poet leaves off…Every poet has his private mythology, his own spectroscopic band or peculiar formation of symbols, of much of which he is quite unconscious.
Quote of the Day
Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they’re so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can’t see them as also possibilities. It’s possible to go to the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous.
Quote of the Day
Ask the greatest of intellects to give you some help by indicating from his own experience how to use the mind. What the hell could he say that couldn’t be translated into the slogans of the sort of book Thurber deals with in Let Your Mind Alone? Train your mind. Adopt regular habits. Concentrate your powers on the task in hand. Eliminate prejudice and see the world as it really is. Two dollars at your nearest drugstore. What more could Aristotle say? What more does Jesus actually say? I suppose everyone knows this, but one of the major activities of art consists in sharpening the edge of platitudes to make them enter the soul as realities.
Alec Nevala-Lee 