“We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work”

— Northrop Frye , book The Well-Tempered Critic

The Well-Tempered Critic, p. 140
"Quotes"
Context: The fundamental act of criticism is a disinterested response to a work of literature in which all one's beliefs, engagements, commitments, prejudices, stampedings of pity and terror, are ordered to be quiet. We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work.

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Northrop Frye 137

Canadian literary critic and literary theorist 1912–1991

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