An Appetite for Poetry - Hardcover

Kermode, Frank

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674040937 ISBN 13: 9780674040939

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1989

Synopsis

Frank Kermode is the preeminent practitioner of the art of criticism in the English-speaking world. As such his task entails the readiness to evaluate in general terms the widest range of texts, both ancient and modern, and also the ability to make public sense of the seemingly arcane debates about theories of literature as they pertain to the ongoing process of evaluation. It has been Kermode’s distinction to make a virtue―as all the best critics have done―of the necessarily occasional nature of his profession. That virtue is evident in every page of this set of essays.

This is a book in which Kermode asks the reader to share his pleasure in the literature of a set of major writers―Milton, Eliot, Stevens. He vividly evokes Milton after the Restoration of Charles II, with a fine speculative discussion of the interplay between his personal and political circumstances and the preoccupations of his poetry. He sets before us T. S. Eliot living in a condition of permanent exile, Wallace Stevens in his old age dwelling poetically in Connecticut, and author/critic William Empson, whose singular career was marked by both the pleasure of the text and the delight in conceptual issues that characterizes so much of the contemporary taste for theory. Other essays draw our attention to debates on the literary canon and problems of biblical criticism and their implications for the study of narrative in particular and the interpretation of secular literary texts in general.

These are professional essays that nevertheless defy the excesses of modern professionalism. Nowhere is this more evident than in the polemical Prologue to the book, in which Kermode sorts out the good from the meretricious in contemporary criticism. He argues that some proclaimed theorists “seem largely to have lost interest in literature,” while the best, like Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, have never lost what Kermode prizes most highly, the very appetite or hunger for poetry and literature. Always readable, elegant even on gnarled matters, and courteous in contexts where others are bad-tempered, An Appetite for Poetry is the work of one of the most distinguished minds of our time. In reaffirming the professional responsibilities of criticism now being neglected, it displays a generous hospitality to new ideas.

About this title

About the Author:

Sir (John) Frank Kermode was Julian Clarence Levi Professor of English Literature, Emeritus, at Columbia University and a Fellow of King’s College, University of Cambridge. He was instrumental in the 1979 founding of the London Review of Books and was knighted in 1991 for his service to literature.

From Library Journal:

Kermode, an important critic who authored The Sense of an Ending and many other volumes, resists the post-modern notion that theory is, if not more valuable than literature, then at least its equal. Bringing considerable expertise to each of these ten essays--which treat Empson, Eliot, and Freud, among others--he instead supports a belief in the primacy of the text. In a lengthy, well-argued prologue, he develops his disagreement with theoreticians who hold not only that all texts are equal, but also that the literary "canon" is but a political act to oppress women and minorities. His comments on Milton and on Wallace Stevens are superbly reasoned and expressed. Much can be learned from this major book, but much learning must be brought to it as well: it is addressed to the professional.
- Vincent D. Balitas, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0674040937
• ISBN 13: 9780674040939
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 254