Author Archives: Bob Denham

Frye and Jazz

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 jazz

In response to Michael Sinding’s Comment:

I think Frye never wrote anything extensively on jazz. He gets a good bit of mileage out of the observation that Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes pulses with a kind of jazz syncopation, repeating that observation three or four times. And there are scattered references to jazz here and there. Here are some:

From Diaries: “It snowed frantically all day, and I sat around wishing the chair in my office was more comfortable, wishing I didn’t have to read that goddamned Edgar book again, wishing I didn’t have to go to the Senior Dinner, wishing I could get started at my book and the hell with all this bloody niggling, wishing the college weren’t getting into such a rah-rah Joe College state, and so on. Regarding this last, Ken Maclean [MacLean] made the very interesting suggestion that Canada was having a post-war Jazz age of its own. It missed, very largely, the 1920 one, but now that we’re getting the post-war children, a lot of prosperity, and a tendency to make the Americans do the responsible jobs, along with a certain backlog of “progressive” education, we seem to be starting where the Americans have left off. (27 March 1952)

In his “Letters in Canada” reviews for 1957 there’s a reference to a poem by a jazz saxophonist. In the same column for 1959 we get this: “John Heath’s Aphrodite is a posthumous collection of poems by a writer who was killed in Korea at the age of thirty four. There is a foreword by Henry Kreisel, who is apparently the editor of the collection. The effect of these poems is like that of a good jazz pianist, who treats his piano purely as an instrument of percussion, whose rhythm has little variety but whose harmonies are striking and ingenious. There is a group of poems in quatrains, split in two by the syntax, where most of the protective grease of articles and conjunctions is removed and subject, predicate, object, grind on each other and throw out metaphorical sparks.”

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Frye and Music

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Bach

“Thank God for Bach and Mozart, anyway. They are a sort of common denominator in music,—the two you can’t argue about.  Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner—they give you an interpretation of music which you can accept or not as you like.  But Bach and Mozart give you music, not an attitude toward it.  If a man tells me that Beethoven or Brahms leaves him cold, I can still talk with him.  But if he calls Bach dull and Mozart trivial I can’t, not so much because I think he is a fool as because his idea of music is so remote from mine that we have nothing in common” (The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp 1:43.)

About Bach, Frye writes the day after his twentieth birthday: “I have shelved the Temperamental Clavichord for a week or so in favor of the Three-Part Inventions. I have owned them for years and never realized it. The ones I am going after now are those in E minor, A major, B-flat major and C minor—four of the loveliest little pieces I know. You should look at the B minor fugue in Book One of the W.T.C. [Well-Tempered Clavier] too. It’s the longest of them all and covers the whole nineteenth century” (ibid. 41)

“Music was the great area of emotional and imaginative discovery for me” (Interview with Deanne Bogdan, see below)

* * *

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Notes on “The Dialectic of Belief and Vision’

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 myth

“Well, the dialectic of belief and vision is the path I have to go down now.”  ––Late Notebooks, 1:73

 Joe Adamson’s reference earlier today to “The Dialectic of Vision and Belief” reminded me of some notes I made for my students several years back.  Page references are to the essay as reprinted in Myth and Metaphor, 93–107.  The students were undergraduates, so here and there I provided a bit of background on Hegel, Derrida, McLuhan, et al.

 1.  Frye calls his title “somewhat forbidding.”  We might consider first what dialectic means.  The word comes from the Greek dialektos, meaning dialogue or debate.  In Plato, dialectic is the science or discipline of drawing rigorous distinctions.  In the Middle Ages dialectic was treated in partnership with logic as being one of the trivium in the medieval education system, the other two being grammar and rhetoric.  The word dialogue also comes from the Greek root, and this seems to be the sense in which Frye is using the word.  Plato wrote his earlier works in dialogue form, using what we now call the Socratic method, which is a way of doing philosophy through discussion between two or more parties.  Hegel was the preeminent modern philosopher for Frye (he makes an appearance in this essay on p. 98), and there might be a touch of the Hegelian sense of dialectic in Frye’s title.  For Hegel, dialectic refers to the process of overcoming the contradiction between thesis and antithesis by means of a synthesis.  So in this essay Frye perhaps means to suggest that something might emerge from the opposition between “belief” and “vision.”

The dialectical method involves the notion that movement, or process, or progress is the result of the conflict of opposites. Traditionally, this dimension of Hegel’s thought has been analyzed in terms of the categories of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.  Although Hegel tended to avoid these terms, they are helpful in understanding his concept of the dialectic.  The thesis, then, might be an idea or a historical movement.  Such an idea or movement contains within itself incompleteness that gives rise to opposition, or an antithesis, a conflicting idea or movement. As a result of the conflict a third point of view arises, a synthesis, which overcomes the conflict by reconciling at a higher level the truth contained in both the thesis and antithesis.  This synthesis becomes a new thesis that generates another antithesis, giving rise to a new synthesis, and in such a fashion the process of intellectual or historical development is continually generated.  Hegel thought that Absolute Spirit itself (which is to say, the sum total of reality) develops in this dialectical fashion toward an ultimate end or goal.  For Hegel, therefore, reality is understood as the Absolute unfolding dialectically in a process of self-development.  As the Absolute undergoes this development, it manifests itself both in nature and in human history. Nature is Absolute Thought or Being objectifying itself in material form.  Finite minds and human history are the process of the Absolute manifesting itself in that which is most kin to itself, namely, spirit or consciousness. In The Phenomenology of Mind Hegel traced the stages of this manifestation from the simplest level of consciousness, through self-consciousness, to the advent of reason.

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Paradox

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 paradox-clock

“In the myth-metaphor world,” Frye writes, “all truth is paradox: a Hegelian thesis where thesis contains and implies antithesis, but lives with it and doesn’t transcend it. A is/isn’t B. This did/didn’t happen. Maritain derives the person or individual from the Incarnation, which releases the Self from the idolatry of things; but the individual doesn’t come from there: he comes from society. In insisting on this Marxism had the real principle. But it’s only in the individual that paradox can exist, as only Self can enter the interpenetrating world. I was always shocked by the Marxist use of ‘the masses’” [Late Notebooks 1:245].

“Whatever one thinks of the Tertullian paradox,” Frye also writes in The Late Notebooks (1:313), “the opposite of it is that trying to reduce belief to the credible is a waste of time and desolation of spirit.” The Tertullian paradox is a version of “I believe because it is impossible.” In De Carne Christi Tertullian set down the principle, “Credibile est, quia ineptum est; certum est, quia impossible” [“It is believable because it is absurd; it is certain because it is impossible”]. See Myth and Metaphor, 97–8. Frye probably encountered the epigram in Sir Thomas Browne, who quotes the last half of it in Religio Medici. See Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works, ed. C.A. Patrides (London: Penguin, 1977), 70 (pt. 1, sec. 9). “One doesn’t bother,” Frye continues, “to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There’s no adventure of the mind there. (Didn’t Coleridge say that Donne was a Christian because it would have been so much easier to be an atheist?) Belief is the Wright brothers getting a heavier-than-air-machine off the ground after the most distinguished scientists had ‘proved’ that it was impossible. In short, belief is the creation that turns the illusory into the real. Being kerygmatic, it emerges on the further side of the imaginative.” For this notebook entry, see Words with Power, 129. The Coleridge reference: “Themes that rule, while they create, the moral will––this is Donne! He was an orthrodox Christian, only because he could have been an Infidel more easily, & therefore willed to be a Christian: & he was a Protestant, because it enabled him to lash about to the Right & the Left–and without a motive to say better things for the Papists than they could say for themselves” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley, 3 vols. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984], 2:220)

And toward the end of the first volume of his Late Notebooks, Frye writes, “Man lives in two real worlds, one spiritual, the other natural, physical, or psychic. In the spiritual world God exists in us and we in him: a paradox that only metaphorical language can begin to express. In this world nature exists in us and we in it, but here the centralizing principle, or ego, is constantly trying to isolate itself. The spirit interpenetrates with its world but never violates: our interpenetration makes war, as Heraclitus said, the centre of all activity, [ ‘It should be understood that war is the common condition, that strife is justice, and that all things come to pass through the compulsion of strife’ (Heraclitus, fragment 26).] because it’s always withdrawing to objectify.”

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Calvin and Frye

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john-calvin

On the face of it, one wouldn’t think that Frye would take a very sympathetic view of Calvin, but here’s a piece he wrote on Calvin at an age when most of us were trying to stagger through an undergraduate curriculum. He was two years past his majority. Perhaps his conclusion about the interpenetration of the historical and transhistorical is relevant to the discussion of both/and.

“The Importance of Calvin for Philosophy”
by Northrop Frye

To make one’s mark in the contemporary world of scholarship one must be both erudite and eclectic: the present age has a vast number of intellectual interests, and the attainments of those who specialize in any one of them are looked upon with respect increasing in proportion as the field becomes more narrow and intense. The high priests of modern learning are expected to be able to talk unintelligibly about their particular subjects and to require a hair splitting nicety of statement from their acolytes. As a result, laymen feel a certain hesitancy in handling the really important questions of those cultural disciplines with which they are unfamiliar and prefer to have the assurance of expert opinion before canonizing any prejudice which involves them.
Why theology should be so grotesque an exception to this rule it is by no means easy to say. Perhaps the safest working assumption is that people are anxious not to concede the validity of theology’s claim to be a cultural discipline because, once theology is recognized, religion must be recognized too, and if religion be recognized, what would become of contemporary society? So the well educated, enlightened man of today grows up with a superstitious awe of science, and a certain amount of respect for philosophy and the arts, but is quite prepared to group theology with alchemy or kabbalism and to talk of religious developments in terms which, by the standards set for any other intellectual pursuit, would disgrace a six year old. Probably most of us will spend a good deal of time explaining gently to otherwise well informed people that mysticism is not the same thing as mistiness, that predestination is not fatalism, or that the ordinary priggish rule of thumb bourgeois morality of the nineteenth century, according to which, if one observed the fifth and seventh commandments, one could break the other eight with impunity, is not Puritanism. After doing that, we should not be too much shocked if we find that John Calvin, who has done more to influence our conception of God than any other man, should be for many people an incarnation of the devil. For the stock caricature of Calvin as a merciless and humourless sadist who really believed only in hell would make a very fair Satan for some aspiring Milton. There may be a few even in so initiated a group as this whom it might be expedient to remind that Calvin was not a Scotchman, that he was only indirectly responsible for Calvinism, and that he was not responsible at all for degradations and perversions of his teachings made by superstitious bigots.
We are not concerned tonight with the rehabilitation of Calvin’s character, but with the investigation of a problem closely bound up with the contemporary abhorrence of him, which may prove, on analysis, to be less inexplicable than it is ignorant and ill considered. The problem may be briefly stated thus. There is no clear line between theology and philosophy: the questions they respectively deal with cannot be disentangled. Both are rationalized accounts of the interrelation of soul, external world, and God. Both rest on axioms supplied by faith. The difference between them is a difference of emphasis. At some periods the theologian and the philosopher become merged into one thinker: thus, Aquinas was the greatest philosopher of his time because he was its greatest theologian, and vice versa. Schleiermacher in modern times provides a parallel synthesis. In Calvin we have a theologian with a first class brain; posterity may prove him wrong, but it cannot prove him a fool: why, then, does he not at least touch on the problems of philosophy? A general history of philosophy is bound to mention Aquinas; it finds no occasion to mention Calvin. The questions which are implied in this include two of some importance: First, does Calvin’s theology have any integral connection with the philosophical thought of Calvin’s time, as is the case with Aquinas? Second, has Protestantism such a thing as a philosophical foundation at all? The former is the subject of our immediate enquiry.

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Frye and Italy

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 anatomia

1.  Frye in Italy.  

The most extensive connection that Frye had with a foreign country was with Italy, a country he visited on seven occasions.  In March of 1937, during his first year at Merton College, he spent time between terms touring Italy with Mike Joseph, a fellow student, visiting Genoa, Pisa, Siena, Orvieto, Rome (where they meet another fellow student, Rodney Baine, and two students from Exeter College), Perugia, Arezzo, Florence, San Gimignano, Assisi, Ravenna, Venice, Verona, Mantua, and Milan.

Two years later, after Frye has finished his Oxford exams, he and Helen took a hurried trip to the continent, leaving London for Paris in late July and meeting Mike Joseph in Florence for a two‑week trip through northern Italy, where they found it difficult to escape the presence of Mussolini:

Some of our friends have objected to our taking a holiday in a Fascist country, feeling that we ought to spend our handful of vacation money in those noble, generous, brave‑spirited, free republics, Great Britain and France. Well, perhaps. Certainly at Sienna, where we had an air‑raid practice and a blackout, we began to get restive at being in an officially hostile country with the papers all hermetically sealed against news. “La politica non è serena,” as our landlady said. But surely away up on this mountain, breathing this free mountain air (one of the voices of liberty, according to Wordsworth, who ought to have known), we can forget about Mussolini for a few hours.

When we get there we find, however, that the town has been made into a “national monument” and Mussolini’s plug‑ugly sourpuss is plastered all over it. His epigrams, too. For every conspicuous piece of white wall in Italy is covered with mottoes in black letters from his speeches and obiter dicta—the successor to the obsolete art of fresco‑painting. One of them says, with disarming simplicity, “Mussolini is always right.” “The olive tree has gentle and soft leaves, but its wood is harsh and rough,” says another more cryptically. “War is to man what maternity is to woman,” says a third. “The best way to preserve peace is to prepare for war,” says a fourth, and it looks just as silly in Italian as it does in English. Another one of the few not of Mussolini’s authorship reads: “Duce! We await your orders.” Up here they present us with “We shoot straight.”

One of these, “The nation should be as strong as the army and the army as strong as the nation,” reminds us how Italy is taxed to the back teeth for her army and how oddly all this gathering of pearls from swine contrasts with the miserable poverty of the town, a poverty as patient and humble as that poor old donkey. But is it so odd? Peasant feeds soldier and soldier kicks peasant—that was the Roman arrangement, so why not now, when the grandeur of Rome is revived and the national emblem once more is a whip? (“Two Italian Sketches. 1939,” Acta Victoriana 67 [October 1942]: 12–14, 23; rpt. in Northrop Frye on Modern Culture, 188–93). 

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Frye and Bloom

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 bloom

In January 1969 Harold Bloom wrote to Frye to tell him about his developing theory of the anxiety of influence. Frye replied, “You don’t say much about the general direction or scope of your book. If you mean influence in the more literal sense of the transmission of thought and imagery and the like from earlier poet to later one, I should think that this was simply something that happens, and might be a source either of anxiety or of release from it, depending on circumstances and temperament. But of course it is true that a great poet’s maturity brings with it a growing sense of isolation, of the kind one feels in Yeats’ Last Poems, Stevens’ The Rock, and perhaps even Blake’s Job series. I should very much like to hear more about the book and about your progress with it” (letter of 23 January 1969). In his Foreword to the fifteenth printing of Anatomy of Criticism, Bloom picks up part of what Frye had written thirty one years before: “Frye disliked the idea of an anxiety of influence, and told me that whether a later writer experienced such an affect was due entirely to temperament and circumstance” (vii).

There is, of course, a difference between “might be a source either of anxiety or a release from it” and “was due entirely.” It might be that the real anxiety of influence was Bloom’s anxiety about Frye’s influence. What Jonathan Allan calls “distancing” could well be and example of the killing off of the critical father. Frye, at any rate, thought so. Some years later he wrote to Morton D. Paley, “I hope it isn’t too arrogant for me to think that I represent Bloom’s chief anxiety of influence (letter of 17 January 1978).

Frye on Wilde

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Oscar Wilde

Re: Frye’s choice for “greatest English critic“:

I think Shelley would be a strong candidate for Frye’s “greatest English critic”–I’m thinking mainly about the Shelley that appears in The Critical Path. I was talking to Frye once about his affinities with Coleridge, and he said he wondered why nobody had ever remarked on his closeness to Shelley. But who knows? Maybe it’s the “divine Oscar,” as Bloom calls Wilde.

Michael Happy writes, “In Creation and Recreation Frye does Wilde the compliment he grants no one else, that I can recall: he adopts his critical outlook with little filtering or conditions. When I was an undergrad, I loved Wilde’s criticism, which I discovered all by myself and couldn’t get anyone else to read. When I finally read Creation and Recreation, I was delighted to discover that Frye had been there before me. But, then, that’s where he always is, isn’t he?”

Here are the passages in Creation and Recreation Happy was referring to, followed by other places in Frye’s writing where Wilde makes an appearance:

A year or so ago, after agreeing to help teach an undergraduate course in Shakespeare, I settled down to reread one of my favourite pieces of Shakespearean criticism, Oscar Wilde’s essay on “The Truth of Masks.” The essay, however, was one in a collected volume of Wilde’s critical essays, and I find it easy to get hooked on Wilde. His style often makes him sound dated, and yet he is consistently writing from a point of view at least half a century later than his actual time. He is one of our few genuinely prophetic writers, and, as with other prophets, everything he writes seems either to lead up to his tragic confrontation with society or reflect back on it. Partly because of this, he deliberately restricts his audience. He sets up a palisade of self-conscious and rather mechanical wit, which not merely infuriates those who have no idea what he is talking about but often puts off those who do. We may get so annoyed at his dandies waving their hands languidly at thick volumes labelled “Plato” or “Aristotle” that we may forget that Wilde could, and did, read Greek, and that his references to classical authors are usually quite precise. So before long I was back in the world of the essay called “The Decay of Lying,” now widely recognized to have said a great deal of what modern theories of criticism have been annotating in more garbled language ever since.

The main thesis of this essay is that man does not live directly and nakedly in nature like the animals, but within an envelope that he has constructed out of nature, the enve¬lope usually called culture or civilization. When Words¬worth urges his reader to leave his books, go outdoors, and let nature be his teacher, his “nature” is a north temperate zone nature which in nineteenth-century England had become, even in the Lake District, largely a human artefact. One can see the importance, for poets and others, of the remoteness and otherness of nature: the feeling that the eighteenth century expressed in the word “sublime” conveys to us that there is such a thing as creative alienation. The principle laid down by the Italian philosopher Vico of verum factum, that we understand only what we have made ourselves, needs to be refreshed sometimes by the contempla¬tion of something we did not make and do not understand. The difficulty with Wordsworth’s view is in the word “teacher.” A nature which was not primarily a human artefact could teach man nothing except that he was not it. We are taught by our own cultural conditioning, and by that alone.

We may see already that the word “creation” involves us in a state of mind that is closely parallel with certain types of paranoia, which may give us a clue to what Wilde means by “lying.” Our envelope, as I have called it, the cultural insulation that separates us from nature, is rather like (to use a figure that has haunted me from childhood) the window of a lit-up railway carriage at night. Most of the time it is a mirror of our own concerns, including our concern about nature. As a mirror, it fills us with the sense that the world is something which exists primarily in reference to us: it was created for us; we are the centre of it and the whole point of its existence. But occasionally the mirror turns into a real window, through which we can see only the vision of an indifferent nature that got along for untold aeons of time without us, seems to have produced us only by accident, and, if it were conscious, could only regret having done so. This vision propels us instantly into the opposite pole of paranoia, where we seem to be victims of a huge conspiracy, finding ourselves, through no will of our own, arbitrarily assigned to a dramatic role which we have been given no script to learn, in a state of what Heidegger calls “thrown¬ness.” ––from Creation and Recreation in Northrop Frye on Religion 36-7

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Some Notes on Frye and Blunden (1)

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Edmund Blunden in 1938

Edmund Blunden in 1938

The relationship between Frye and his Oxford tutor is, like most human relations, complex.  Frye’s attitudes toward Blunden emerge during the course of his correspondence with Helen Kemp (Frye).  Blunden’s view of Frye is more difficult to untangle.  Other than Frye’s statements about Blunden in the Frye‑Kemp letters, I think Frye makes only five references to his tutor.  In a 1942 diary entry, he mentions Blunden in passing: “I’d like to write an article on Everyman prudery sometime.  Geoffrey of Monmouth; the translator’s smug sneer on p. 248.  Malory, according to Blunden” (Diaries 33).  The meaning here is uncertain, but perhaps Frye is remembering a remark of Blunden’s that the Everyman edition of Malory’s Arthur had been bowlerdized.”  There’s another passing reference in Frye’s foreword to Robin Harris’s English Studies at Toronto. In his 1952 diary he remarks that Douglas LePan had visited Blunden in Tokyo (504).  The fourth reference comes in a review of C. Day Lewis’s translation of Virgil’s Georgics: Frye writes that the translation has “much in common with the best of the English bucolic school: with Shanks, Blunden, Edward Thomas, and Victoria Sackville-West’s The Land” (Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 71 [March 1948]: 337-8).  Then in a review of Robert Graves’s Collected Poems Frye writes that Graves is closer in technique to Blunden than to Eliot (Hudson Review 9 [Summer 1956]: 298).

These remarks are inconsequential for understanding the Frye‑Blunden relationship.  In an interview with Valerie Schatzker Frye reports that Blunden “was a rather shy, diffident man.”  At least they had those traits in common.  Then Frye adds, signaling an enormous difference, “for some bloody reason, which I’ve never figured out, he was pro‑Nazi.  I didn’t know who to blame for that.”  In a letter to Helen (28 May 1937) Frye wrote that “Blunden came back from Germany full of enthusiasm for the Nazis.”  Blunden was in fact accused in 1939 of being a Nazi sympathizer.  Here’s the way his politics is presented on the Edmund Blunden website, established by his family:

In April 1940 Edmund wrote to the Times to deplore plans to bomb German cities, fearing for the inevitable killing and wounding of civilians. As a result, Annie’s [Annie was the German wife of Blunden’s brother] home in Tonbridge was raided by the police who took all [his wife] Sylva’s letters to Edmund, and returned to the house to go through all Edmund’s books.  Edmund told the Warden of Merton that he had already written to his old Commanding Officer, [Col. Harrison in Undertones of War] to offer his services, and soon found himself in uniform again as an officer in the University’s Officers Training Corps.

Blunden was not interested in politics but was vehemently opposed to war. He refused to be drawn into the politics of pacifism. His refusal to politically engage in the late 1930’s led to him being labelled a Nazi and subsequently, in the 1950s, a communist, following his visit to China, shortly after the end of the Korean war.  His belief in the fundamental goodness of the ordinary man and the need to avoid war at all costs, consistently led him to being politically misunderstood, particularly during the tumultuous events of the 1930s.  He used his writing, public speaking and visits to Germany in an ambassadorial attempt to influence opinion against any recurrence of the 1914-18 conflagration.  This was emphatically not a political voice but one that believed in bringing nations together by talking to each other and building strong human ties.  He was convinced that were his battle-weary generation in positions of power, war would naturally be averted.  He was devastated when it became clear that lessons from the tragedy of the Great War were being ignored and in many cases trodden upon. (http://www.edmundblunden.org/productservice.php?productserviceid=299)

It would be interesting to see what Barry Webb’s biography of Blunden has to say about this.

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Frye’s Superlatives

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 signature

The first step in developing a genuine poetics is to recognize and get rid of meaningless criticism, or talking about literature in a way that cannot help to build up a systematic structure of knowledge. This includes all the sonorous nonsense that we so often find in critical generalities, reflective comments, ideological perorations, and other consequences of taking a large view of an unorganized subject. It includes all lists of the “best” novels or poems or writers, whether their particular virtue is exclusiveness or inclusiveness. It includes all casual, sentimental, and prejudiced value judgments, and all the literary chit-chat which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock exchange. (Anatomy of Criticism 18)

From Frye’s Notebooks (lifted from Northrop Frye Unbuttoned) 

The Greatest Book Ever Written (at Oxford).  I’m in Oxford now, & from my point of view the greatest book ever written at Oxford is the Anatomy of Melancholy. [RT, 132]  (Abbreviations and links to texts below.)

The Greatest Book in the Bible. Genesis. [LN, 1:337] 

The Greatest British Monarch.  King Arthur. [LN, 2:598]

 The Greatest Creative Mind of Modern Times.  Shakespeare. [NRL, 108]

 The Greatest Critic of His Time (potentially).  If Hopkins could only have got rid of his silly moral anxieties, his perpetually calling Goethe a rascal and Whitman a scoundrel and the like, he’d have been the greatest critic of his time. [RN, 325]]

 The Greatest Eros Poet (English).  The greatest Eros poet in English is probably Marvell. [RT, 136]

The Greatest Eros Poets (Non-English).  Dante & Plato are the world’s greatest Eros poets. [RT, 407]

The Greatest Example of Linearity. Christianity to the Bible was typically a linear, step by step response, the sacramental disciplinary habitus of which the greatest illustration is the interlocking march of Dante’s terza rima from one end of the chain of being to the other. [RT, 240]

 The Greatest Fiction Writer of the Century (potentially).  God, I wish D.H. Lawrence had some sense of real satire: if he had he’d have been by long odds the greatest fiction writer of the century. [LN, 1:322]

 The Greatest Form of Prose.  The Utopia. [LN, 1:404]

 The Greatest Form-Shaper.  Dante is an analogical visionary & stands opposite the Scripture, the “paradox” involved being that the greatest of form-shapers turns out to be the supreme analogist or reverser of the Word (Logos). [NAC, 4]

 The Greatest Historical Novel.  War and Peace. [LN, 1:407]

 The Greatest Imaginations.  Defeated nations have the greatest imaginations. [RT, 185]

 The Greatest Impersonator in History.  There are three kinds of geniuses: imposers, imposters, & impersonators, & I may be the greatest impersonator in history. [RN, 33]

 The Greatest Literary Genius after Blake.  The greatest literary genius this side of Blake is Edgar Allan Poe. [LN, 1: 165]

 The Greatest Masterpiece of Experimental Prose in English Fiction.  Tristram Shandy. [LS, 63]

The Greatest Moral Virtue. Jesus speaks of hypocrisy, which may be a vice in the gospel context but is one of the absolutely essential cementing force that holds society together. Morally, it is the greatest of all virtues. [LN, 1:270]

The Greatest Number of Demonic Images.  The book with the greatest number of demonic images in it I ever read (the Inferno of course doesn’t count) was Melmoth the Wanderer. [TBN, 142]

The Greatest Occasional Writers.  The occasional writing, of which the supreme example is the epistles of Paul, & the greatest English example probably Burke, needs more development. [RN, 77]

 The Greatest Play of Shaw.  Saint Joan. [LS, 180]

 The Greatest Poet for Shakespeare.  Ovid [TBN, 315]

 The Greatest Protestant Poet of the Pathos.  Bach [FMW, 166]

 The Greatest Shakespearean Comedy.  The Tempest. [LS, 158]

 The Greatest Symposium Writer.  Plato. [LN, 2:552]

 The Greatest Thanatos Poem.  The Iliad. [NR, 168]

 The Greatest Titanic Spirit in Literature.  Hamlet himself is the greatest example in literature of a titanic spirit thrashing around in the prison of what he is. [LN, 1:13]

 The Greatest of Vices.  Pride is the greatest of vices partly because it is the most futile of vices: man has nothing to be proud of. [LS, 87]

Abbreviations and links to primary texts after the break.

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