A miniature depicting Dante and Beatrice, by Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia, from a fifteenth-century edition of Dante’s Paradiso. Courtesy the British Library

Discussed in this essay:

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, by Northrop Frye. Princeton University Press. 408 pages. $22.95.

The New Science, by Giambattista Vico. Translated from the Italian by Jason Taylor and Robert C. Miner. Yale University Press. 480 pages. $28.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell. New World Library. 432 pages. $24.95.

One day in the autumn of 1980, during my first semester of graduate school, I was making my…