SOURCE: "Blake's Introduction to Experience," in The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. XXI, No. 1, 1957-58, pp. 57-67.

A Canadian critic and editor, Frye is the author of the highly influential and controversial Anatomy of Criticism (1957), in which he argues that literary criticism can be scientific in its method and results and that judgments are not inherent in the critical process. Believing that literature is wholly structured by myth and symbol, Frye views the critic's task as the explication of work's archetypal characteristics. In the following essay, he uses Blake's "Introduction" from Songs of Experience to introduce the major tenets of Blake's philosophy.

Students of literature often think of Blake as the author of a number of lyrical poems of the most transparent simplicity, and of a number of "prophecies" of the most impenetrable complexity. The prophecies are the subject of some bulky commentaries, including one by the present writer...