Hamilton Arts & Letters
When he chose the title for his Whidden Lectures of January 1967 (The Modern Century), Northrop Frye was referring first of all to the century of Confederation in Canada. He was also referring, of course, to the period that included his lifetime and that of his audience. And he was making a further reference to the period when literature and the arts worldwide were making late-Romantic and post-Romantic turns. The second lecture especially was devoted to a comprehensive description of the arts. It featured a word rarely found in Frye’s critical writing. He referred twice to “modernism” and its “anti-Romantic” phase, found especially in critics like Wyndham Lewis and T. E. Hulme (Modern 65, 68), who wrote in the early twentieth century. I graduated from college in 1967, and it was evident to anyone who studied literature at the time that an era of writing in English was coming to an end. T. S. Eliot had died in 1965; E.J. Pratt, in 1964; William Carlos Williams, in 1963; William Faulkner, in 1962; Ernest Hemingway and Hilda Doolittle (H. D.), in 1961; Albert Camus and Richard Wright in 1960. James Joyce and W. B. Yeats had died in 1939; Wallace Stevens and Dylan Thomas, in the 1950s. Ezra Pound would live until 1972. All of these writers were associated with the period known as modernism. Any sense of a modernist movement per se had long “played out,” as Frye’s former student Hugh Kenner would remark in 1971: “‘The twentieth century’s early modernism,’ we yawn respectfully or indifferently. There have been so many modernisms. That period, we feel sure, played itself out” (Kenner 246). But it was in full swing during Frye’s student years. His teachers would “bootleg” information about modern writers into their lectures, and his letters from Oxford include references to Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, and Yeats, who were all still writing, along with authors like D. H. Lawrence and W. H. Auden. Although it would be a stretch to call Frye a modernist critic, his aesthetics were clearly formed by reading modernist authors, especially Eliot and Joyce. [ >>>>> FORWARD ]
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