Northrop Frye. Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake. Ed. Angela Esterhammer. Vol. 16 in Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. ISBN: 978-0802039194. Price: US$85.00/£55.00.

The present volume, expertly edited and intelligently introduced by Angela Esterhammer, is of mostly previously-published work and is divided in two parts: (1) on pp. 3-181, everything Frye published on Milton (including the book, The Return of Eden), plus an unpublished tribute, for a Festschrift, to Balachandra Rajan, the eminent Miltonist; (2) on pp. 185-435, everything Frye published on Blake, excluding Fearful Symmetry, which has been edited by Nicholas Halmi as volume 14 in the Collected Edition. Depending on how one counts, there are six or ten chapters on Milton (the five essays making up The Return of Eden are treated as one chapter), and twenty-three chapters on Blake, some of them very brief. The Milton material spans the years 1950-1985 and consists of the introduction to Frye’s teaching edition of Milton, ‘Paradise Lost’ and Selected Poetry and Prose; the highly schematic demonstration of his theories originally delivered to the International Comparative Literature Association, “Literature as Context: Milton’s ‘Lycidas’” (1959); the book, The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics (1965), the first four chapters of which were spoken with only a few notes as a series of lectures at Huron College, wittily if somewhat obscurely titled “A Tetrachordon for Paradise Lost,” to which a previously-published essay on Paradise Regained, “Revolt in the Desert,” was added; an essay written for a tercentenary tribute to Paradise Lost, “The Revelation to Eve” (1969); an essay originally published in the celebrated collection on Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, The Prison and the Pinnacle, “Agon and Logos” (1973); and lastly the tribute to Rajan. While the original publications on Milton are easier to find than much of the Blake material, Esterhammer has collated the publications in their various versions with the notebooks and typescripts in the Northrop Frye Collections at Victoria University. She has produced definitive texts from which all scholars will now want to cite. Frye’s authority as a preeminent Blake scholar means that much of the material on Blake in this volume, ranging from 1947 to 1987, consists of brief descriptions and reviews scattered in many different publications, although there are some major writings, too, for example, “Notes for a Commentary on Milton”; three essays here titled, simply, “William Blake I, II and III”; two essays on Blake’s reading of the Book of Job; and the major, well-known essay, “The Keys to the Gates” (1966), with its amusing opening sentence: “The criticism of Blake, especially of Blake’s Prophecies, has developed in direct proportion to the theory of criticism itself” (337). In this impersonal statement of the case, which leaves Aristotle and Johnson in the dust, no reference to the author of Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism is required. We see from the reviews and introductions collected here what a remarkable, but also orderly and conscientious teacher Frye was. Reviews are not written for the ages, but the reviews gathered here make for a lively and discerning survey of the high points of Blake scholarship through the years since the publication of Fearful Symmetry. For example, David Erdman’s Blake: Prophet against Empire, a book one might suppose to be uncongenial, given the priority of historical and political contexts in Erdman’s study and Frye’s lifelong agon with the historicists, gets an admiring review from Frye, who notes that Erdman is the first historical expositor of Blake to have “a consistently full knowledge of the meaning of Blake’s Prophecies” (237). That is high praise, from Frye. But there is a flash of steel. When he goes on to say that the …