Nine Poets

The Chancellor’s Gold Medal, Victoria College ‘The truth shall make you free’ is the college’s motto Artist: David Blostein

A. F. Moritz

Words with Power?

In love with Blake since at twelve I’d read Yeats’ famous edition, I discovered Frye’s Fearful Symmetry when a third-year student at Marquette University, in 1967–68. For about three excited months, it seemed to me that Frye was a more dynamic visionary, a wider door open from banality and restriction into splendour, than Blake himself. This delusion of course soon faded but my admiration for Frye remained.

My second encounter with him occurred in 1971, when I read Anatomy of Criticism simultaneously with Paz’s The Bow and the Lyre, keeping notes on, and writing poems out of, the divergences and convergences of these extraordinary books of equal stature, which also are, especially perhaps in the case of Paz, poems themselves. Frye speaks in his conclusion of the activity of criticism: ‘reforging the broken links between creation and knowledge, art and science, myth and concept,’ a program and a prophecy that makes one think of Paz: ‘True imagination is born of criticism; a way of confronting reality, not escaping it.’

When I arrived in Toronto in 1974, I lived not far from Frye’s home, and would sometimes see him on the Mt Pleasant bus. Or I’d watch him from the bus’s window as he trod along St Clair Avenue East, seemingly deep in thought, with a couple of white plastic grocery bags in his hands, carrying home something to Mrs Frye. I never was introduced, so never spoke to him. But after his death I read a published list of the contents of his library: it had contained two of my books of poems. Now I teach classes and have an office in Northrop Frye Hall at Victoria College, University of Toronto. It must be an experience of many poets, writers, or scholars to find themselves often encountering Frye in this manner, in life, art, and thought.

One of my sightings of him occurred as I walked across the city, including the University of Toronto campus, on an autumn day at a time when Words with Power had recently appeared and I was working on a review of it for Brick magazine. In material terms, it was a difficult epoch for me. This, and my long walk that day to the frequent sound of bells, and my chance crossing of paths with the then ailing Frye, and my thoughts on his analytical, historical, and prophetic insights into word and tradition, turned into the following poem. . .in which it seems that Leopardi, and an infernal Milton, for the time being triumph over Blake.

Full Circle

i.m. Northrop Frye

A bell woke me and I went out into the squares where bells harried men and women and were harried by ropes, by motors. In crossings at factories, apartments, stores where the sun, first to work, was starting to polish dusty windows and goods and wet down the pavement with light, in the plaza of city hall, the bells’ round mouths drowned in machine noise, their flower-chalice bodies invisible up in masked towers, where many in fact were recordings over loudspeakers, reminiscences of bells of simplified vibration and much greater power than the old metal. But in the quiet university common the carillon eddied clearly in tree crowns amid wings through brightness that hadn’t yet reached the ground, while under it boys and girls flowed anxious and laughing in contradictory streams, and parted around the shuffling cancerous old scholar, intent on each detail, the girls, the boys, the morning flies on new roses, as he meditated words with power. How impossible for these bells not to ring for me just as they do every morning, noon, and night, and how hard not to hear them harking back...