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The ‘Journey of the Magi’ was the first of a series of poems T. S. Eliot later grouped together as the 'Ariel Poems' and was published in 1927 shortly after Eliot’s baptism into the Church of England. Critics argue convincingly that this poem reflects Eliot's state of mind as it moved from an old faith in secular modernism to a new Christian faith, paralleling the journey of the ‘Wise men from the East’ towards Christ with Eliot's own spiritual journey. Told from the point

It seems we’re all doomed, then. As we have progressed through this series of articles so far, literature has moved through Frye’s modes from the earliest periods of Myth to the contemporary Ironic culture; humanity has lost its sense of what Barfield called ‘original participation’ with the world and become disaffected and alienated in a compartmented universe; we have left childhood behind and have nothing left but the empty cynicism of adulthood. Next step: death. From

The accompanying table reminds us of our thesis so far: Northrop Frye’s categorisation of literature into the five evolving modes of Myth, Romance, High Mimetic, Low Mimetic and Irony parallels the development of the thing called ‘fiction’ through the ages, but also mirrors the development of the individual, from early childhood to adulthood - and this whole movement is also related to the progression described in Owen Garfield’s work Saving the Appearances, from a state in w

Another good example of what I mean by the ‘Ironic culture’ of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries is T. S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, which some regard as the most important poem of the twentieth century. The Waste Land has been the subject of a great deal of critical analysis and scholarly interpretation, with many still arguing over ‘what it means’. But this is actually our first indication that we are dealing with an Ironic work: works of previous modes and other

I have asserted in earlier articles in this series that we are living in an Ironic Age. By that, I mean that there are various indications in the art, literature, film, theatre and other cultural expressions of our time that there has been a shift towards a focus on the ‘darker pole’. Myth tells us that from an initial Void there emerges a set of binary positions, commonly referred to as Light and Dark. What forms between these poles - i.e. everything that we know of as ‘the

In examining Great Expectations, what exactly should our thesis lead us to look for? The same kind of things that we have been finding all along: two poles, a set of archetypes, and a motion toward one of the poles. In Myth, the image presented is usually either of an eternal battle or balance between Light and Dark; in Romance, the forces of each are arrayed in terms of supernatural virtues and vices; in the High Mimetic, the same forces struggle with each other, often resul

I wanted to present a table to you which may be largely fanciful but could also be a way of summarising the scene so far: Northrop Frye’s division of fiction into several modes has in his work Anatomy of Criticism and elsewhere been most usually associated with time periods, more or less aligning to those given above. I have taken the additional step of correlating them with stages of growth, as shown, then these in turn broadly relate (I’m asserting) to the progression ou

William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) was a great Irish poet, and was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others. He helped to found the Abbey Theatre and served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Born in Sandymount, Ireland, he spent childhood holidays in County Sligo, studying poetry from an early age. Irish legends and the occult feature in the first phase of his work. His earliest volume of lyrical poems was published in 1