It may not please those who know the great differences in pedagogical method between the New Critics and Northrop Frye to have me begin by suggesting that Frye is part of a single modern movement to democratize criticism and demystify the muse. I would go further and say that Frye is our most radical demystifier of criticism, even though his great achievement is the recovery of the demon or of the intrinsic role of romance in the human imagination. His importance to literary history proper is as a topographer of the romance imagination in its direct and displaced forms. But in his service to the ongoing need to have greater numbers of persons participate in the imaginative life, to open the covenant of education until the difference between persons is really "ghostly," only a matter of more intense or lesser participation, he continues the vision of those first...