Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake

by Northrop Frye

This brilliant outline of Blake's thought and commentary on his poetry comes on the crest of the current interest in Blake, and carries us further towards an understanding of his work than any previous study. Here is a dear and complete solution to the riddles of the longer poems, the so-called "Prophecies," and a demonstration of Blake's insight that will amaze the modern reader. The first section of the book shows how Blake arrived at a theory of knowledge that was also, for him, a theory of religion, of human life and of art, and how this rigorously defined system of ideas found expression in the complicated but consistent symbolism of his poetry. The second and third parts, after indicating the relation of Blake to English literature and the intellectual atmosphere of his own time, explain the meaning of Blake's poems and the significance of their characters.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Criticism, Philosophy, Art, Literature

475 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

Born in Quebec but raised in New Brunswick, Frye studied at the University of Toronto and Victoria University. He was ordained to the ministry of the United Church of Canada and studied at Oxford before returning to UofT.

His first book, Fearful Symmetry, was published in 1947 to international acclaim. Until then, the prophetic poetry of William Blake had long been poorly understood, considered by some to be delusional ramblings. Frye found in it a system of metaphor derived from Paradise Lost and the Bible. His study of Blake's poetry was a major contribution. Moreover, Frye outlined an innovative manner of studying literature that was to deeply influence the study of literature in general. He was a major influence on, among others, Harold Bloom and Margaret Atwood.

In 1974-1975 Frye was the Norton professor at Harvard University.

Frye married Helen Kemp, an educator, editor and artist, in 1937. She died in Australia while accompanying Frye on a lecture tour. Two years after her death in 1986 he married Elizabeth Brown. He died in 1991 and was interred in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, Ontario. The Northrop Frye Centre at Victoria College at the University of Toronto was named in his honour.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop...

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 3 out of 5]

TANGLED IN THE FALLEN VINES -
PICKIN’ UP THE PUNCH LINES -
I KNOW I’M FAKING IT!
Simon & Garfunkel

This book - Frye’s first, the one which cemented his worldwide following - is based on a well-oiled lie. Frye says Blake was decidedly not a madman. Baloney. He had his embarrassing episodes as I have had mine.

I know, know - it’s a fine line between insanity and Gnosticism - but those empowered by Enoch’s myth of the Race of Giants err greatly in all things religious. And Frye is no exception. Bipolars are naive; Gnostics are Politely Pharasaical.

In such a way, the well-oiled clockwork bedevilment of Academic Gnosticism catapulted a young dropout of the Protestant Cloth to his great Wool-Gathering Glory in this revolutionary 1950’s book...

And sunk my own contrariously struggling soul - till, smothered in the smoke and tangled in the fallen vines of my anguished struggle through my Freshman and Junior Uni Years, I fell into dreary disrepute.

If you buy this one, caveat emptor.

This brand of criticism FAKES its way through the Classics, rather than LIVING ‘em with its Heart! Frye suffers from a dry academic dearth of heartfelt emotion.

When I turned twenty, before my Sophomore Year - I girded my loins for combat - a young, naive Sir Gawain, preparing to face my dreaded nemeses, the well-oiled Green Knights, as in the medieval Poetic Work.

Yes, they’re oily, these Green Knights of Gnosticism.

May as well take up your sword against the very Wind! Is there any hope for us hapless, well-meaning Believers in a Higher Purpose, against a clamouring and rowdy too-Green World?

Yes, says Karl Barth - but FIRST we must ‘reduce’ or concentrate our faith, as we would stir and reduce a culinary sauce over low heat so it gains more solidity, in the forge of sober postmodernism - and then Act wisely.

Seeing faith as a no-frills and absurdly Quixotic fight which tries to ground goodness in the raging river of gnostic permissiveness. And still believing. Seeing its Absurdity, yes, but KNOWING that such combat is mandatory.

Then, and only then, will we hold our tongues and find a modicum of Grace in the onslaught.

For it is only after a prolonged stretch of alternation between moments of peace and rest, and the arduous work of putting our shoulder to the sword or to the ploughshare that we find real hope.

Life’s not fair, but it’s good.

To see that we must clamber up to the eagle’s-eye vantage point of our Creator, who sees the good that is in BOTH sides of the struggle.

Northrop Frye may have been partial to hidden meanings in literature, as are all Gnostics, but he - like us - must pay the consequences of our Promethean Theft of Fire from Heaven.

Why?

Blake himself sums it up. The transition into culpability is our own coming of age from Innocence to Experience. Culpability and innocence - shade and light.

Neither from nor toward -
There the dance is...

And ALL Blake’s work REALLY indicates he chose to plea for innocence -

Over jaded experience -

At a far remove from the knowingly “Experienced” Gnostic Mindset:

And NOT falling into the trap of “easy” Gnosticism!

For Blake preached not gnostic faith, but the Process of Becoming Fully Human. Even - yes - if madness bars your way. As it did Blake’s.

You know, our full humanity - taking the good and the bad of ourselves, and moulding it into a Christian soul in the forge of attentive faith - overrides the gnostic heresy any day.

From which heretics, catching the scent of integrity, are forced to flee.

For it is made of Faith in the Incarnation, which they reject. Becoming a hard-knocks-embracing human follower of the Lord, you become their nemesis.

No, Northrop, I regret to disagree, but what Blake was REALLY selling was the Human Truth of Religious Thinking and NOT mere myth and deceit.

For, in the end, we ALL pay the full price for the gift of experience -

Right down to the last Purgatorial Jot and Tittle -

Including, my dear Northrop, Gnostic Giants such as yourself.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well... this book is alternately fascinating and frustrating, a long, discursive summary of "Blake's thought" as Frye sees it. Because of how labrynthine and involuted Blake's writing was - especially in the prophetic books - there are necessarily quite a few 25-30 page sections of pure summary, things like "Urothria is the son of Spooptapulus, wife of Borg, which means that the artistic imagination reigns supreme in the third dyad, blah blah blah." I just made those names up, but I'm going to guess that the effect of them is about the same as the effect of Blake's real counters on someone (like me) who hasn't read the thousands of pages of poetry/myth that Frye is describing. In other words, ka-what?

However, once Frye has laid the pieces in front of you, his hands are free for some amazing analysis. Essentially, he suggests that Blake's mythology illuminates a pattern that is repeated, not just in a few other world mythologies, but in all of them. So a close reading of Blake's canon provides a blueprint of the creative imagination.

Frye is a fantastic writer. Some of his statements are so fluent and persuasive that I almost forgot that I was studying Blake: after a certain point I was much more interested in what Frye's anatomizing intelligence could tell me about how poetry is made.

I don't know who I'd recommend this book too. Probably people with patience and a strong strain of intellectual masochism.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fearful Symmetry is one of the most important works of 20th century English criticism and deserves the widest audience possible. Being the key work of Northrop Frye it must be read by anyone truly committed to understanding him. While Frye has written many other outstanding books, none contain such a complete and cogently argued statement of Frye's ideas.
Fearful Symmetry accomplishes two important things: (a) it explains why the Bible is the "Great Code" of English literature and (b): it explains William Blake's key role in the elaboration of an English mythopeoia.
In Blake's view the key function of art (p. 357) was is to tell the Biblical drama of :
1. Man's Fall
2. Man's Struggle in his Fallen State
3. Christ's Redemption of Man on the Cross
4. The Apocalypse
Artists must be visionaries like Christ's apostles and create works that allow men and women to perceive God. "Art, because it affords a systematic training in [divine] vision, is the medium through which religion is revealed. The Bible is the vehicle of revealed religion because its a unified vision of human life and therefore as Blake says : 'the Great Code of Art.'" (p. 45)
Through art one approaches the divine: "The place of honour in art goes to the artist who has passed through religion and come out the other side. Such an artist, in Blake's symbolism ... through the ring of fire into Eden where man is no longer a creature but a creator and is one with God." (p. 345)
In Frye's view the England's mythopoetic tradition was founded by Spencer who combined symbols from Arthurian tales, popular superstition and Biblical images in his epic the Faerie Queene. Spencer was able to what he did because he lived in the era when the religious capital of England had been moved from Rome to London where it was united with the political capital.
The puritan Milton brilliantly advances the tradition with his epic of the fall and redemption makes heavy use of Greek classical mythology. Milton presents Satan as being passive and unable to perceive the divine.
Blake who followed Milton felt that the greatest sin was passivity. Christ's followers must active visionaries endeavouring to perceive God. Priggish morality becomes evil. Blake adds elements from the islandic Edda to the English mythopoetic mix.
In Frye's view, after Blake English literature fell into a decadent phase as Deism and romanticism pushed the heroic English Mythopoetic tradition off stage.
Many people in this century feel that Tolkien with the Lord of the Rings revived the English Mythopoetic tradition adding the Finish Kalevala to it. However there seems to be no way of knowing what Frye would have thought of this hypothesis. Fearful Symmetry was published before the Tolkien cycle. While Frye is known to have read the Lord of the Rings he made no public comment about it. Nonetheless, the combination of elements from English folklore, the Edda, and Bible found in Tolkien's work make it difficult to see the Lord of the Rings as anything else but a part of the tradition of Spencer, Milton and Blake.
One also feels that Blake's synthesis of various mythologies and his expressed belief that there this is "only one language and one religion" are consistent with those of Joseph Campbell who created the model for the on-going Star Wars saga. If popular culture counts, Blake's vision is more popular than it ever has been.

[Ilya · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not embarrassed to admit that, on first encounter, I found Blake’s prophetic poetry (especially, “The Four Zoas,” “Milton” and “Jerusalem”) entirely unapproachable and downright impossible. For that matter, the much-celebrated and more straightforward “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience” are also far richer and more complex than they first appear. But the prophetic writings are something else altogether: the strangeness, the density of the symbols, the bizarre mythology, the irregular punctuation and versification are all there at once, and they overwhelm quickly. Even good annotations, such as those in the Penguin Classics edition, can only do so much. So, I cast around for help, and that is how I discovered Northrop Frye’s “Fearful Symmetry.” Indeed, “discovery” won’t do; Frye is a revelation. Rather than cracking some non-existing code, the study methodically illuminates every sinew and joint of each poem, producing in the end a single, unified vision of Blake’s poetic imagination. And as he does so, Frye delivers some of the most brilliant scriptural exegesis I have come across. For anyone with any interest in Blake’s poetry (not biography) beyond the “Tyger,” Frye is indispensable.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the two seminal works on Blake in the twentieth century, the second being Erdman's Prophet Against Empire. Frye's study of Blake led to his Anatomy of Criticism, a defining work within literary criticism in English. Frye's work is a study of Blake's symbols, approaching Blake's work as myth (as opposed to Erdman's, who reads Blake's work historically). It's still an excellent work for someone first venturing in to Blake's labyrinthine prophet works.

[Mary Overton]

"There is only one false religion as there is only one true one; and it has two infallible marks. First, it postulates some kind of God who is unknown and mysterious because he is not inside us but somewhere else: where, only God knows. Second, it preaches submission, acceptance and unquestioning obedience. The sting is in the tail. Religion of this kind being invented only to buttress the status quo, it is always 'State Religion, which is the source of all Cruelty.'....
"In the unfallen world objects of perception are alive and intelligent; and a faint echo of the animation of that world survives in the animism of primitive religion. The nymphs, satyrs and fauns of Classical mythology are older and more authentic than the Olympian hierarchy. With the separation of existence and perception, however, the natural object became attached to the latter and its spirit or Genius to the former, so that gradually a belief in invisible deities grew up. The eleventh plate of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the paragraph beginning 'The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses,' traces this process with a clarity that might impress even a modern student of the subject. In the later poems Blake contrasts the 'fairies' of the more original belief with the 'heathen gods' who succeeded them. These gods were invariably selfish and cruel, as a God whose interests do not run counter to those of man cannot be invoked in support of a tyranny. Ovid shows them particularly interested in stifling and suppressing the artists who attempted to rival them (i.e., create better gods), as in the stories of Marsyas and Arachne." pp. 60-61

"... art is neither inferior nor equal to morality and truth, but the synthesis of civilized life in which alone their general laws have any real meaning. Art is neither good nor bad, but a clairvoyant vision of the nature of both.... Art is neither true nor false, but a clairvoyant vision of the nature of both....
"....
"Now just as the poet is brought up to speak and write one particular language, so he is brought up in the traditions of one particular religion. And his function as a poet is to concentrate on the myths of that religion, and to recreate the original imaginative life of those myths by transforming them into unique works of art. The essential truth of a religion can be presented only in its essential form, which is that of imaginative vision....
"The artist qua artist neither doubts nor believes his religion: he sees what it means, and he knows how to illustrate it. His religion performs two great services for him. It provides him with a generally understood body of symbols, and it puts into his hands the visionary masterpieces on which it is founded: the Bible particularly, in the case of Christian poets. Many of these latter have petrified into sacred Scriptures supposed now to impart exclusive formulas of salvation rather than vision. It is the business of a poet, however, to see them as poems, and base his own poetry on them as such." pp. 117-119

[Saul]

This is a monumental book. It took 120 years for him to arrive, but Frye is the critic that Blake deserves, balancing careful scholarly analysis with imaginative poetic descriptions of his own. It's even more remarkable that this was his first book.

I have to admit this took a long time to read, but it was worth it. The first hurdle was getting acclimatized to Blake's theory of knowledge, which is central to his whole project. It is a radical idealism that is first stated rather abstractly, but begins to make more sense once it is examined in the context of art, science, religion, and politics. In short, it is an extreme "literalism of the imagination". The word "imagination" can sound a bit flat to modern ears -- "vision" is pretty much synonymous to Blake and carries more of the power that he intended.

Before reading this book I had read Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry". It makes the bold argument that imaginative art precedes science (and everything else):

Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life.

But Blake takes this to the extreme, and elevates it to the level of a metaphysical system. The craziest part is that you actually start to believe it (even if you're terminally STEMbrained like me).

I was intrigued throughout by Blake's views on religion. It's clear he was a very "religious" man in some sense, but he was also quite hostile to orthodox theology. His "infernal or diabolical" reading of the Bible is compelling, and is certainly a hermeneutic with the full force of a powerful imagination behind it. I'm sure most orthodox-minded people would find Blake's theology scandalous, but I have the sense the broader view of it is pretty compatible with certain traditions (Eastern Orthodoxy for example), though I'm not a theologian. My intuition tells me that Blake's thought is most closely aligned with some sort of Whiteheadian Christian Panentheism (someone should write an essay on that).

But this is ultimately just speculation. What really matters is Blake's poetry and art. If you want to get a sense of what Blake believed, you can get it from the man himself. From a letter to a friend:

[...] And now let me finish with assuring you that, though I have been very unhappy, I am so no longer. I am again emerged into the light of day; I still and shall to eternity embrace Christianity, and adore Him who is the express image of God; but I have travelled through perils and darkness not unlike a champion. I have conquered, and shall go on conquering. Nothing can withstand the fury of my course among the stars of God and in the abysses of the accuser. My enthusiasm is still what it was, only enlarged and confirmed.

As you can see from the above quote and from practically anything he wrote or created, Blake brought an almost frightening intensity to everything he did. You really get the sense that his entire life was an intellectual and spiritual war waged on multiple fronts. He truly lived the life of a prophet, being neglected and ridiculed for his entire career, yet still dedicating it all to producing a canon of some of the most visionary and eternally relevant art and poetry in our culture.

I am excited to continue working through Blake's complete works with the foundation I now have from Frye. I can already feel my imaginative capabilities slowly growing. I no longer see the Guinea-Sun, but something far more strange and beautiful.

[Will Lashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A reference today to a guinea coin made me return to this book and I realised I have never recommended it on Goodreads, a serious omission as it is one of the most formative books I have ever read. Reading William Blake's longer poems like "The Four Zoas" or the earlier prophetic books can be daunting. To immerse yourself in Blake's cosmology requires grasping and reinterpreting not just the classical and Biblical references but Blake's more contemporary influences such as the mystics Emmanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme and especially the English poet he most admired and resisted, John Milton. Northrop Frye published "Fearful Symmetry" in 1947, his first book, and it really foreshadows his lifelong work to create a critical tradition that magnifies the breadth of Western literature by restoring the mythological grounding and investing that with modern psychological insights. Criticism needed to entail both structural and narrative insights and historical comparisons but it also demanded daring leaps of poetic inspiration and metaphorical transformation. While “Fearful Symmetry” is not composed or strictly intended as a "key" to Blake, it gives you a glimpse of the Blakean Vision. Northrup takes the more straightforward and well known body of Blake's poems like the "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" and uses these as a starting point to explain the oppositions that figure the unity of Blake's liberating "System", challenging the reader to look through the Eye and frame for himself "thy fearful symmetry", and in doing so gives the reader hope to see the scope of Blake's imagination by being faithful to his own. Blending an analysis and defence of the artwork of the "madman" and printer of Lambeth with his illuminated words, Northrop Frye restored William Blake to the canon of great English Romantic Poets by demonstrating that his "insanity" was a revolt against the cruelty and arid rationalism of his time. Blake's art was a refuge from insanity, not an idiosyncratic retreat into it. Frye's book is really indispensable, not only as a guide but as a classic in itself.

[Anima · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Cosmology is a literary art, but there are two kinds of cosmology, the kind designed to understand the world as it is, and the kind designed to transform it into the form of human desire. Platonists and occultists deal with the former kind...
Cosmology of this type is speculative, which(..) is ultimately intellectual narcism, staring into nature as the mirror of our ordinary selves.
What the mirror shows us is what Blake calls “mathematic form,” the automatic and mindless universe that has no beginning nor end, no up nor down. What such a universe suggests to us is resignation, acceptance of what is, approval of what is predictable, fear of whatever is unpredictable.
Blake’s cosmology, of which the symbol is Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot of God with its “wheels within wheels,” is a revolutionary vision of the universe transformed by the creative imagination into a human shape.
.....
....I wrote Fearful Symmetry during the Second World War, and hideous as that time was, it provided some parallels with Blake’s time which were useful for understanding Blake’s attitude to the world. Today, now that reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerfully in Jerusalem, one of the most hopeful signs is the immensely increased sense of the urgency and immediacy of what Blake had to say. "
NORTHROP FRYE

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a profound work of criticism, the subject being the life work of William Blake. It's very unusual in its poetic and visionary content. This is a very far out book, which altered my conceptions of Blake, as well as the Bible, and world history.

[Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly life-changing book. Starting over right as I finish.

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Before the Fall, Man was absolute wisdom, and was the circumference of everything. Nothing then existed outside of Albion; sun, moon, stars, the center of the earth and the depth of the sea, were all within his mind and body, a body fully conscious of being alive, not only in its brain but in all parts of itself down to the feet...In eternity all the homes of the soul, the body, the palace, the city and the garden, are one; and the eternal community of men is also the real presence of a divine body, whose blood is the new wine created from the water of nature." (Frye, 350-351)

Consisting of three sections, entitled, respectively, "The Argument," "The Development of Symbolism," and "The Final Synthesis," Northrop Frye's masterpiece of Blake-centered criticism, "Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake" is an intriguing, by turns maddening, but ultimately an inspiring foray into the world of William Blake, the 19th century poet and engraver who, due in part to Frye's efforts, has had an outsize effect on the literary world. In fact, through each step of this faithful and comprehensive effort, one is amazed at the depth of Professor Frye's understanding of Blake's work as well as his understanding of the Bible which supports so much of Blake's oeuvre. So, yes, the figures of Urizen, Orc, Los, Rintrah, Tirzah, and Satan are all discussed exhaustively as they appear in the prophetic books which outline Blake's self-honed mythology, but also Moses, Aaron, Daniel, Ezekial, Sampson, Deliliah, and scores of other Biblical characters make an appearance, and they are all discussed revealingly in relation to Blake's idiosyncratic 'reading' of the Bible, a reading this reader came to accept and revel in. Additionally, the myths of King Arthur, the 18th and 19th century figures of Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire, figures anathema to the volatile Blake, are all explained cogently and in an easy to comprehend manner. Indeed, the density of the prose, where, in addition to these aforementioned figures, literary luminaries like Chaucer, Langland, and Keats, are added, is only matched by the depth and profundity of the message, which comments on the state of art, civilization, and of the human soul, with perspicuity and wisdom. It is as if each phrase Frye writes is 'distilled' wisdom, like some magical elixir, designed to elucidate Blake as well as advance the cause of mythopoetic (archetypal) criticism in general. To add on, the last segment of the book is an argument (well-phrased) for the relevance of this 'school' of the literary arts that is extremely persuasive, in the mind of this reader.
Clearly, Professor Fyre's work is of the highest caliber and should be recommended for those who have an interest in Blake's work, the Bible, the arc of Western literature, and the means to live a better (and more true) life. It is that good!

[Peter McLaughlin]

There’s more than one way to evaluate the ideas put forward in this book.

(1) Are they an accurate depiction of the historical Blake’s thinking and artistic process?
I am uncertain but think the answer is ‘no’. Among other things, Frye’s Blake is a kind of Kantian, which the historical Blake could not have been.

(2) Whether or not they are Blake’s ideas, are they good ideas?
Here the answer is definitely ‘no’. Frye was a philosophical incompetent and a crackpot.*

(3) Whether or not the ideas are accurate to the historical Blake, do they make good predictions that can help you understand Blake’s work?
This is a version of Milton Friedman’s famous criterion. And Frye meets it: if you read Blake with Frye’s model in your head, you’ll get great insight into Blake. To give just one example, you will understand extremely deeply why Blake was not a nature poet, and what this has to do with his rejection of Paleyan natural theology.

I wish a philosophically and historically sensitive non-crackpot would write a successor that meets criterion (1) as well as (3). But in the meantime, Frye will have to do.




* He was the worst kind of crackpot, too: the crackpot who tries to hide his crackpottery by making his claims vague to the point of unfalsifiability.

When e.g. Robert Graves makes an assertion about the deep structure of myth underlying all poetry, he at least has the good grace to be clear that he’s making a specific historical claim: poetry is a historical tradition, inherited from pre–Indo-European civilisation, and the myths of that civilisation still structure the inherited norms of good poetry. It’s crazy, but at least it wears its craziness on its sleeve.

Frye also wanted to make assertions about the deep structure of myth underlying all poetry, but he didn’t want to have to go off and live on an island with Sufi mystics: there were dinner parties to attend. So he had ro insulate his ideas from obvious criticism, and the way to do that was to say that his claims have nothing to do with history or empirical psychology or even metaphysics, that their truth is on some other level to do with ‘vision’ or whatever.

To this end, Frye is strategically wishy-washy about the claims’ exact content, being clear only negatively (this isn’t something science can bear on). I prefer the honesty of Graves.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947) came to me through the same door as everything else in my Blake journey: Benjamin McEvoy's reading path, which recommended it as essential companion reading for tackling the major prophetic books. McEvoy was right. I could not have navigated Milton and Jerusalem without this book in my other hand. Whether I found Frye fully convincing is another matter.

What Frye Is Arguing

The central thesis of Fearful Symmetry is that Blake's complete body of work forms a unified, systematic whole — that the early lyrics, the illuminated prophecies, and the great epic poems are all expressions of a single coherent imaginative vision that develops with something approaching logical inevitability. As Nicholas Halmi puts it in his introduction to the Princeton Classics edition: "Blake's works form a thematic unity and can be interpreted systematically in relation to one another" (p. xv). Frye's enormous achievement is making this case across nearly 500 pages of dense, learned, exhilarating prose — tracking the emergence of Blake's mythological figures, mapping the relationships between his symbols, and demonstrating that what looks like chaos in the prophetic books is, on Frye's reading, a fully articulated system.

This is a genuinely impressive intellectual performance. It is also, I suspect, somewhat too neat.

My Reservations

Having now read all ten works on McEvoy's path, and having also read Poetical Sketches — the collection of juvenilia Blake wrote between twelve and twenty — I find Blake's development considerably less linear and directed than Frye suggests. The teenage poet of "Fair Elenor" and "Gwin, King of Norway" does not feel like a man executing a predetermined plan toward the mythology of Jerusalem. He feels like a precociously gifted young man finding his way, making wrong turns, abandoning projects, and arriving at something extraordinary partly through design and partly through the magnificent accidents of a long creative life.

Halmi seems to share some version of this reservation, noting that "Blake himself nowhere stated that he conceived his poems in illuminated printing — etched rather than engraved — as a distinct body of work, let alone a prophetic canon" (p. xvi). And Frye himself, in a moment of unusual candor, acknowledges the evidence of radical incompletion:

"His longest poem, The Four Zoas, Blake left abandoned in a manuscript full of lively sketches and loaded with deletions and corrections. Much of its material was later used in Milton and Jerusalem, which he did engrave; but, proportionately, Blake may be said to have blotted more lines than any other important poet of English literature." (p. 6)

For me, this incompletion does not diminish Blake — it humanizes him. A Blake who revised obsessively, who abandoned his longest poem and cannibalized it for two others, who worked and reworked his symbolic system across decades without ever declaring it finished, is a more interesting figure than the serene systematic prophet Frye sometimes implies. The mess is part of the meaning.

What Frye Does Brilliantly

My reservations about the central thesis do not diminish my admiration for what Fearful Symmetry actually accomplishes, which is considerable. Frye is the finest guide I have found to Blake's symbolic logic — to the way the Zoas and their Emanations function, to the relationship between Urizen's tyranny and mental uniformity, to the distinction between the fallen and the regenerated imagination. His formulations are often memorable in the way that great criticism is memorable — they stay in your head:

"What Urizen wants is mental uniformity, common sense, and the social product of this is the rule of tyrants over victims. Two friends of equal status are not necessarily uniform in their minds; a master and a slave are, because the master is as much a product of a slave state as the slave, and is equally enslaved by it." (p. 222)

This is the kind of sentence that illuminates not only Blake but the world Blake was writing about — and, uncomfortably, the world we still live in.

Frye's treatment of The Four Zoas is particularly moving precisely because the poem is the great failure of Blake's career:

"The Four Zoas remains the greatest abortive masterpiece in English literature. It is not Blake's greatest poem, and by Blake's standards it is not a poem at all; but it contains some of his finest writing, and there is much to show that it would have contained some of his best engraving. Anyone who cares about either poetry or painting must see in its unfinished state a major cultural disaster." (p. 269)

On the epic form and Blake's relationship to time, Frye offers one of his most suggestive formulations — one that finally made sense of the non-linear, all-time-at-once structure of Milton and Jerusalem:

"The ordinary historical conception of human existence as a dissolving flux in linear time is therefore the literal approach to life, the corporeal understanding based on memory. History as the total form of all genuine efforts of human culture and civilization is the canon or Scripture of human life. History as linear time is the great apocrypha or mystery which has to be rejected from it." (p. 340)

Blake does not move through time in his epics because he does not believe that the eternal imagination is subject to time. Once you have Frye's formulation in your head, the looping, collapsing chronology of Jerusalem stops being a defect and becomes a theological argument.

Blake's Christianity — Heretical but Not Blasphemous

Frye makes a compelling case that Blake always worked from within a Christian framework, however radically unorthodox. This is an important corrective to readings that treat Blake as simply anti-Christian. He was not. He was anti-Deist, anti-Urizen, anti-natural religion — but his imaginative world is soaked in Scripture, and Frye shows exactly how:

"Only the poetic imagination can comprehend the Bible, and the Bible introduces that imagination to a mental world of inspired wisdom, culture and beauty in which all religions are one. This visionary tolerance is the opposite of the rational tolerance which holds that all religions are equally attempts to solve an insoluble mystery." (p. 345)

And on Jerusalem specifically — the culmination of everything Blake attempted:

"Blake's poem attempts to recreate the central vision of life, based on the Bible, which made Milton a great Christian poet... Blake is, therefore, trying to do for Milton what the prophets and Jesus did for Moses: isolate what is poetic and imaginative, and annihilate what is legal and historical. This is also what he is trying to do for himself, and there will always be a curse on any critic who tries to see the Christianity and the radicalism of Blake as a dichotomy instead of a unity." (pp. 345–346)

As someone who is myself an atheist with a deep love for the Bible and its literary and moral traditions — a tension I have explored at length in my reviews of Bart D. Ehrman's work — I find this reading of Blake unusually resonant. You do not have to believe what Blake believed to be moved by what Blake built. The imaginative power of his vision does not depend on its metaphysical truth claims, any more than the power of Paradise Lost depends on accepting Calvinist theology.

Frye on Blake's Isolation and Integrity

The book's closing assessment of Blake as a personal and cultural force is one of the most moving passages in it:

"Blake's great value as a personal influence in English literature is that he is so outstanding an example of a precious quality of mental independence. Very few writers even in England have been so startlingly free of accepted shibboleths in religion, morality or politics…The public's contemptuous neglect of Blake [in his lifetime] was as wrong and foolish as it could be, but nevertheless Blake owes much of his integrity to his isolation." (p. 413)

This rings true. Blake never found a significant audience in his lifetime. He was regarded by most of his contemporaries as eccentric at best and mad at worst. He continued engraving his prophetic books and illuminating them by hand for a readership that barely existed. The integrity that Frye identifies in this isolation is the same integrity that makes the work so extraordinary: a man who could not compromise his vision even when compromise might have gained him readers, money, or recognition.

A Note on the Prose

I should warn potential readers: Frye is not easy. His prose is erudite to the point of occasional obscurity, and I found myself looking up archaic or technical terminology more often than in almost any other critical work I have read. I highlighted 174 passages in the eBook — which is partly a measure of how much I found illuminating, and partly a measure of how much I needed to mark in order to follow the argument across nearly 500 pages. The effort is worth it. Frye's style eventually becomes its own pleasure — dense, assured, built for a reader willing to slow down and work. But it is not a book to rush.

Verdict

Fearful Symmetry is not a biography of Blake — Frye is far more interested in Blake the poet than in Blake the human being, and biographical details appear only insofar as they illuminate the work. It is a work of literary criticism and analysis of the highest order, and the most systematically useful guide to Blake's mythology I have encountered. My reservations about its central thesis — that Blake's development was more linear and intentional than the evidence fully supports — do not diminish my gratitude for what Frye made possible. Without this book, Milton and Jerusalem would have been considerably more impenetrable than they already are. With it, they became something I could not stop reading.

Appendix: My William Blake Reviews

Poetical Sketches (1783)
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)
The Book of Thel (1789)
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793)
America: A Prophecy (1793)
Europe: A Prophecy (1794)
The Song of Los (1795)
The Book of Urizen (1794)
Milton: A Poem in Two Books (1804–1811)
Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804–1820)


[Image: Book Cover]

Citations:

Frye, N. (2025). Fearful symmetry: A study of William Blake (Kindle Edition). Princeton Classics. https://www.amazon.com/Fearful-Symmet... (Original work published 1947).

Bloom, H. (1961). The visionary company: A reading of English romantic poetry. Doubleday.

Bloom, H. (1963). Blake's apocalypse: A study in poetic argument. Doubleday.

Title: Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake
Author(s): Northrop Frye
Year: 1947
Genre: Nonfiction — Literary Criticism & Analysis
Page count: 482 pages
Date(s) read: 5/22/26–6/1/26
Book 109 in 2026

[John]

Don't let anyone tell you that you'll never read one of the books that has sat for decades on your shelves unread. I'm now reading Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry, a study of William Blake's poerty, the very same copy that I bought about 40 years ago, and have been lugging about for just as long in the clear and unremitting anticipation that one day I would actually read it. And so I am. I'll report later whether it was worth the wait.

[Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Northrop Frye is one of those amazing literary critics no one's ever heard of. I first discovered him when handed a collection of lectures he gave on canadian radio. This is a very astute reading of Blake.

[Kit]

Heavy-duty humanities. I had to press pause on this one. Maybe I will come back after finishing the Bible, and Blake. I'm very impressed by Frye's erudition. They don't write em' like this anymore, perhaps because no one is well-read enough.

[Esther · Rating 5 out of 5]

Difficult, technical, in depth study of Blake's entire literary canon. I gave it five stars because it helped me better understand Frye's later books and it gave me an deeper appreciation for the literary tradition that Blake contributed to and participated in.

[Steven Roosa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frye offers up a compelling interpretation of the entire corpus of Blake's work. If you love Blake, you will love Fearful Symmetry.

[Zachary Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book about Blake's theories and concerns. If your thinking about trying to make sense of his intense poetic visions, this is a good place to start.

[John Garrett · Rating 1 out of 5]

why is Frye famous lmfao idk if there’s a more overrated critic in the history of lit crit

he literally just says shit and people are like: 🧐🧐🧐 yes yes

[Brandon]

This book was awesome. Incredibly erudite, while being as easy to read as is possible for a non-specialist. It feels like was personal friends with William Blake.

Frye is so adept at explaining complex symbolism to a non-specialist. I got so much out of my reading but I also feel there's a lot I didn't fully understand. I am certain I will want to return to this book again after some years.

Blake was first and foremost a poet, and Frye's main thesis is that he is not some freak that must be understand in terms of mysticism or idiosyncratic theology.

Blake was a metaphysical idealist. He was an iconoclast for dichotomies and hated the analytical mind that tears things apart to better understand them, spiritually killing them in the process. Instead he believes that all good works come from synthetic imagination that works by addition instead of subtraction. The analytical frame tears things apart until there's nothing but chaos; the synthetic imagination takes the mundane every day things and shows what is sacred or eternal in them.

Blake was a prophet in the sense that he saw himself as the role of the public intellectual who says the truth that nobody wants to hear. He was also quite prophetic in the vulgar sense of forseeing how modernity would evolve into disenchanted, atomized postmodernity. His intellectual boogeymen were Locke, Bacon, Rousseau, Voltaire, and "deism".

Review incomplete

[Steve Chisnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is truly an extraordinary piece of scholarship, denied 5 stars only by its inconstant compulsion to be read. It was Frye's first book (the beginning of an amazing career), but designed more for his studies than for me. Nevertheless, his thorough and groundbreaking analysis of Blake's cosmogony did wonders to certify some "imagination" I had about a world of reason, but it did so with an eloquence that I could never have summoned on my own while opening up some of the limitations of thinking and theory at the time (1947). I can never read "The Tyger" again the same way, nor dare I approach the single works of other writers so cavalierly.

There is little point in attempting to summarize Frye's interp of Blake here in the brief space; rather it is incumbent upon my own creations to enact a response to it and to do justice to the imagination. What Blake has done for me most of all is help me capture--through his own understanding of allegory--my need to resist the mills.

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is, more or less, just a very accurate account of Blake's theories of poetry/metaphysics and the contents of the prophetic books, which I feel could better be gleaned by reading Blake's works themselves alternatively, although there is some interesting discussion of Blake's sources (including an analysis, seemingly Frye's own, of a Blakean theory of Biblical poetry) and an informative biographical timeline of his authorship. I would probably only recommend this to those who were confused in reading something like The Portable Blake (which contains both the poems and much of Blake's prose/notes). I think the main appeal of this book is also in its role as predecessor to Anatomy of Criticism, which emerged from tangents excised from this book, so perhaps after reading that I will have some additional thoughts about this book.

[Andrew Pitkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took a fourth year English seminar on William Blake in my undergrad career with a simpering idiotic professor who stumbled around pointing out who Blake was as a person and poet.

I wish Northrop Frye had been my Professor, because he makes Blake compelling as an artistic/cultural/personal figure. I actually started to appreciate his obscure works that were made less clear to me by the meanderings of my inept undergrad professor. I guess it goes to show that being employed by a university, teaching a course on a subject/author, and having tenure doesn't actually make you qualified to dispense material to young folks.

Self-teaching about Blake has taught me loads - just like James Joyce. Blake was Joycean in many ways, or Joyce was Blakean - who knows!

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I said about in my review of William Blake's works, there is an audience for this but it's not me. If you are interested in literary criticism, 18th century philosophy, and the unusual cosmology/mythology of Blake, this is the ideal book for you. If not, then you may want to dip into this book as you read works by Blake. That's what I'm doing and Frye provides as lucid an introduction as is possible for Blake.

[Harry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential criticism for anyone interested in Blake's work, especially his prophetic books. You need to go into this with a decent understanding of not only The Bible but of, Swedenborg, Newton, Milton, Locke, Bacon and the political and historical events of the time.

[Alan Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense, but that is not a criticism. I will need to reread it after I reread all of Blake.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic in depth analysis chiefly of Blake’s longer works and his use of symbols

[Raptazure · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely wonderful and illuminating!