ESTABLISH THE UNITY

Northrop Frye's first book was Fearful Symmetry, his study of William Blake's poetry in "a broad literary context." Frye presented Blake in Fearful Symmetry "as an illustration of the poetic process." On page 426 Frye states that the whole purpose of his book was "to establish Blake as a typical poet and his thinking as typically poetic thinking."

" Of course a poet may give many useful suggestions about his own work, but we read the poem not the poet, except by a figure of speech. Hence the primary activity of all communication with the poet is to establish the unity of his poem in our minds. We have quoted Blake as saying that every poem is necessarily a perfect unity. This unity has two aspects: a unity of words and a unity of images." (Page 113)

ON HOMERS POETRY, (E 269)
 "Every Poem must necessarily be a perfect Unity, but why Homers is
peculiarly so, I cannot tell: he has told the story of
Bellerophon & omitted the judgment of Paris which is not only a
part, but a principal part of Homers subject
  But when a Work has Unity it is as much in a Part as in the
Whole. the Torso is as much a Unity as the Laocoon
  As Unity is the cloke of folly so Goodness is the cloke of
knavery  Those who will have Unity exclusively in Homer come out
with a Moral like a sting in the tail: Aristotle says Characters
are either Good or Bad: now Goodness or Badness has nothing to do
with Character. an Apple tree a Pear tree a Horse a Lion, are
Characters but a Good Apple tree or a Bad, is an Apple tree
still: a Horse is not more a Lion for being a Bad Horse. that is
its Character; its Goodness or Badness is another consideration.
  It is the same with the Moral of a whole Poem as with the Moral Goodness 
of its parts Unity & Morality, are secondary considerations &
belong to Philosophy & not to Poetry, to Exception & not to Rule,
to Accident & not to Substance. the Ancients calld it eating of
the tree of good & evil.
  The Classics, it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that
Desolate Europe with Wars."

In Frye's introduction to a subsequent book, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, he makes a statement about teaching which may be applicable of the writer and reader of poetry as well:  

"The ideal of the scholar is to convey what he knows as clearly and fully as he can: he lays down his hand and remains dummy, so to speak, while the reader plays it. The teacher may do the work of the scholar on a popularizing level, retailing established information to less advanced students. This conception of teaching as secondhand scholarship is common among academics, but I regard it as inadequate.

The teacher, as had been recognized at least since Plato's Meno, is not primarily someone instructing someone who does not know. He is rather someone who attempts to re-create the subject in the student's mind, and his strategy in doing this is first to get the student to recognize what he already potentially knows, which includes breaking up the powers of repression in his mind that keeps him from knowing what he knows. That is why it is the teacher, rather than the student, who asks most of the questions. The teaching element in my own books has caused some resentment among my readers, a resentment often motivated by loyalty to different teachers. This is connected with a feeling of deliberate elusiveness on my part, prompted mainly by the fact that I am not dispensing with the quality of irony that all teachers since Socrates have found essential. Not all elusiveness, however is merely that. Even the parables of Jesus were ainoi, fables with a riddling quality. In other areas,such as Zen Buddhism, the teacher is a man who shows his qualifications to teach by refusing to answer questions, or by brushing  them off with a paradox...Unless something is kept in reserve, suggesting the possibility of better and fuller questions, the students mental advance is blocked."  (Page xv)

Wikipedia Commons
Watercolor Illustrations for Blair's The Grave
Object 5