 Firstly and most fundamentally, it presupposes that literary criticism is a discipline in its own right, independent of literature.Claiming with John Stuart Mill that "the artist… is not heard but overheard," Frye insists that
This "declaration of independence" (Hart xv) is necessarily a measured one for Frye.For coherence requires that the autonomy of criticism, the need to eradicate its conception as "a parasitic form of literary expression,… a second-hand imitation of creative power" ("Anatomy" 3), sits in dynamic tension with the need to establish integrity for it as a discipline.