
“The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.”
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 4: The Keys To Dreamland
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html
Context: The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment. Literature's world is a concrete human world of immediate experience... The world of literature is human in shape, a world where the sun rises in the east and sets in the west over the edge of a flat earth in three dimensions, where the primary realities are not atoms or electrons but bodies, and the primary forces not energy or gravitation but love and death and passion and joy.
“The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.”
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 4: The Keys To Dreamland
(describing Marx’s view), p. 21.
Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971)
1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)
The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (1899), The Man With the Hoe (1898)
Context: Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in the aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned, and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Powers that made the world.
A protest that is also a prophecy.
Source: New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1941), p. 13
Speech at Birkbeck College (20 March 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 146.
1924