CONNECTIONS BETWEEN NORTHROP FRYE AND ROBERT GRAVES

Abstract

Though any written trace of direct communication between Canadian theoretician Northrop Frye and British poet and novelist Robert Graves cannot be found, Frye often referred to the prolific British author in his reviews especially when weighing in Graves’ contribution to the mythopoetic school of criticism. In Frye’s opinion, Graves’s contribution is not in creating a “systematic mythology” but in depicting “mythical use of poetic language, where we invent our own myths and apply them to an indefinite number of human themes” (Gill 2010, lvi).  Graves does not lead us to the objective systematic mythology since the myth in his poetry does not seem to be part of an objective system but a kaleidoscopic chaos of human fragments. It is the combination of mythical fragments that create the meaning of the poem after all while the central path to the author’s mind is found through broken images. In that sense the paper shows how the absence of direct correspondence between two authors gives way to the presence of relations between their works which is mainly reflected through the way they applied the myth of the Goddess in their works.