Books : Poetry, Drama & Criticism : History & Criticism : Key Critics : Kermode, Frank

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Books : Poetry, Drama & Criticism : History & Criticism : Key Critics : Kermode, Frank

• The Waste Land and Other Poems (Penguin Classics)

  T. S. Eliot

  
  
   

• Shakespeare's Language

  Frank Kermode

  
  Sir Frank Kermode's Shakespeare's Language is a deeply significant publication, the result of a lifetime of writing and thinking on the Bard by one of our greatest critics, and it certainly lives up to its expectations. Kermode's numerous critical studies, such as The Sense of an Ending, have become classics and his recent memoir Not Entitled vividly captured a life of letters, characterised by a passionate commitment to the value of literature.

  The author begins by lamenting the fact that general readers have not "been well served by modern critics, who on the whole seem to have little time for [Shakespeare's] language". However, rather than launching into a diatribe against current literary fashions, he proceeds to offer an elegant and detailed account of how "Shakespeare became, between 1594 and 1608, a different kind of poet". For Kermode, Shakespeare "moved up to a new level of achievement and difficulty", associated with the rich complexities of Hamlet and the enigmatic poem The Phoenix and the Turtle. Kermode defines that shift as "the pace of the speech, its sudden turns, its backtrackings, its metaphors flashing before us and disappearing before we can consider them. This is new: the representation of excited, anxious thought; the weighing of confused possibilities and dubious motives". This leads Kermode to break his book into two parts. The first deals with the plays up to 1600, including some controversial dismissals of plays, including As You Like It, whilst the second part offers 15 detailed chapters on the tragedies, problem plays and romances. Each chapter is full of detailed and illuminating interpretations of the difficulties, but also pleasures of Shakespeare's language. This is classic Shakespeare criticism, written in the mould of Johnson and Coleridge.--Jerry Brotton

  
   

• The Way We Live Now (Penguin Classics)

  Anthony Trollope

  
  
   

• Aspects of the Novel (Penguin Classics)

  E.M. Forster, Oliver Stallybrass

  
  
   

• He Knew He Was Right (Penguin Classics)

  Anthony Trollope

  
  
   

• The Literature of Renaissance England (Oxford Anthology of English Literature)

  
  
   

• Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America)

  Wallace Stevens

  
  
   

• The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Bryn Mawr)

  Frank Kermode

  
  
   

• The "Figure in the Carpet" and Other Stories (Classics)

  Henry James

  
  
   

• The Waste Land and Other Poems (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

  T. S. Eliot, T. S. Elliot

  
  
   

• Essays on Conrad

  Ian Watt

  
  
   

• The Good Soldier (Barnes & Noble Classics)

  Ford Madox Ford

  
  
   

• The Age of Shakespeare

  Frank Kermode

  
  
   

• Shakespeare: "King Lear" (Casebook)

  
  
   

• The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: Volume I: The Middle Ages through the Eighteenth Century: 1

  
  
   

• Romantic Image (Routledge Classics) (Routledge Classics)

  Frank Kermode

  
  
   

• The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Galaxy Books)

  Frank Kermode

  
  
   

• The Oxford Book of Letters

  
  
   

• The Literary Guide to the Bible

  
  
   

• Pleasing Myself: From "Beowolf" to Philip Roth

  Frank Kermode

  
  Sir Frank Kermode is the grand old man of English letters, and in Pleasing Myself he gathers together a collection of some of his finest literary journalism published between 1990 and 2000. Kermode reflects on the dying art of the journalistic review essay, which is "in my view a satisfactory genre, for the writer can be moderately expansive and please himself, as well as moderately expansive and willing to please". The pleasure for Kermode is that "I educate myself in public, which I take to be the reviewer's privilege". What follows are 29 elegantly written reviews of everything from Seamus Heaney's new translation of Beowulf to Philip Roth's "splendidly wicked book", Sabbath's Theater. Kermode admires WB Yeats and TS Eliot as poets, quarrels with the same Eliot and William Empson as critics, worries over the philosophy of Russell and Ayer, admires the paintings of Jack Yeats and Howard Hodgkin, castigates American New Historicism as "a bloodless ballet of social practices", and wonders "if money is a kind of poetry". Pleasing Myself is characterised by Kermode's endorsement of Empson's belief that "there was a right and a wrong moment to bring theory into the business of intelligent reading, and that the professionals chose the wrong one". Kermode is never guilty of choosing his moments badly, although some readers might find that Pleasing Myself is an interesting but rather self-absorbed summary of what Kermode has been asked to review over the last 10 years. --Jerry Brotton