Science & Tech Quote by Northrop Frye

Frye is trying to rescue originality from the cult of the lone genius. By yoking poetry to scientific discovery, he makes a deliberately bracing claim: the new doesn’t arrive as a foreign body. It “manifests” what was already there, concealed in the system. In science, a discovery feels like a rupture, but it also clicks into place with everything we already know; its legitimacy depends on that fit. Frye insists poems work the same way. They don’t merely express private feeling or personal experience; they reveal previously unrealized possibilities already embedded in language itself.

The subtext is a quiet polemic against two romantic habits: treating poetry as pure self-expression and treating criticism as parasitic. If poems are latent in “the order of words,” then criticism can be more like taxonomy than taste-making: mapping structures, genres, archetypes, recurring patterns that make certain poems not only possible but, in retrospect, almost inevitable. “Order” matters here. Frye isn’t describing a free-for-all of language games; he’s arguing that literature has constraints and systems, and that innovation is a recombination that the system can recognize as meaningful.

Contextually, this sits squarely in mid-20th-century criticism, when formalism and structural thinking were offering alternatives to biography and moral uplift. Frye’s analogy flatters poetry by giving it science’s prestige, but it also disciplines it: the poem’s novelty isn’t an escape from tradition, it’s tradition becoming newly legible.