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Anatomy of Criticism

Book by Northrop Frye · 16 quotes · Art, Criticism, People

This seminal book delves into the theoretical underpinnings of literary criticism, analyzing various critical approaches and their implications for the study of literature.

Book detail: Anatomy of Criticism is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.

This seminal book delves into the theoretical underpinnings of literary criticism, analyzing various critical approaches and their implications for the study of literature.

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Anatomy of Criticism Quotes

“Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.”

Made Novel Copying

Book:Anatomy of Criticism

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

“In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.”

Art Facts Poetry Values Literature Importance Aim Structure Sake Symbols Primaries Interconnected Motifs

Book:Anatomy of Criticism

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

“A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.”

Ifs May Doe Process Study Willing Criticism Unconscious Crystals Snowflake

Book:Anatomy of Criticism

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

“Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.”

Form Culture Understanding Atheism Objects Essentials Approach Worship Intellectual Positive Atheism Tendencies Idolatry

Book:Anatomy of Criticism

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

“It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.”

Culture Limits Essence Acceptable Imaginative

Book:Anatomy of Criticism

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”

People Believe Doe Facts Suffering Literature Speak Fiction Reader Radio Ghost Checks Relief Stations Categories Dislike Opera Quarrels Soap Heroines Soap Operas Radio Stations

Book:Anatomy of Criticism

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

“Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.”

Order Nature Discovery Structure Related Latent Scientific Discovery

Book:Anatomy of Criticism

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

“The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.”

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

“What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.”

Ifs Wells Art Courses Century Pure Criticism Phrases What If Nineteenth Century Cosmology Exact Sciences

Book:Anatomy of Criticism

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

“A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.”

Knows Want Trying Art Ends Loses Memories Criticism Sake Likes Civilized Retreat

Book:Anatomy of Criticism

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

“Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.”

People Art Use Values Asks Answers Impossible Concerned Rate Sympathetic

Book:Anatomy of Criticism

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

“Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.”

Art Body Study Students Criticism Physics Organized Distinguished Systematic

Book:Anatomy of Criticism

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

“Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.”

Literature Study Subjects Objects

Book:Anatomy of Criticism

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

“Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of”

People Art Grows Loses Audience Growing Up Generations Art Is Originals Favors Vulgar Lighting New Generation

Book:Anatomy of Criticism

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

“It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.”

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

“All other statements of intention, however fully documented, are suspect. The poet may change his mind or mood; he may have intended one thing and done another, and then rationalised what he did.”

Opinions Suspect

Book:Anatomy of Criticism

Source: Anatomy of Criticism

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