The Bush Garden

Any publication by Northrop Frye is an important literary event; this one is of the highest importance to Canadian literature. Here Frye has collected all the essays he believes to be of permanent value on Canadian writing and painting. His tremendous intelligence and erudition is thus focused on a much smaller field of vision than it normally is. Tethered in its own backyard, as it were, this formidable creature can be observed more closely than it can be when it roams the far reaches of the literary world.

Frye’s handiwork is equivalent to most everyone’s masterwork. Nor can I imagine a more perceptive book being written about the Canadian poetic imagination. Northrop Frye resembles nobody so much as a poet Midas — everything he touches turns into poetic metaphor.

These reviews are still relevant, partly because Frye is such a good critic and partly because his reviews embraced such a wide range of poetry that, perhaps especially in retrospect, they provide a fascinating sense of process through which a literature develops . . . We can respond to the immediate perceptions of a subtle and literate critical mind.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Bush Garden is that it reveals Northrop Frye as a practical critic. He does not try to fit everything he reads into preconceived theories, and the range of his sympathies is admirably wide. And he succeeds in demonstrating the importance for Canadian writers of their Canadian forebears.