(This collection of essays by a literary critic includes a discussion of various writers - Milton, Eliot, Wallace Stevens; ideas about problems in biblical criticism and their implications for the study of narrative; and an essay on William Empson)

AN APPETITE FOR POETRY. Essays in Literary Interpretation.

Literature & Fiction

Kermode, Frank

Poetry

Collins

1991, British hardcover edition, Collins, London, U.K. 432 pages, hardcover. Frank Kermode, who died in 2010, was a respected British literary critic, who wrote several books of his own. Here is a collection of book reviews, some brief, others extended, along with essays on various subjects. Readable, scholarly, and like a lot of the British authors, a lot of fun to dip into time and again.

The Uses of Error

British & Irish

An autobiography by the eminent English literary critic traces  his childhood on the Isle of Man, his work on ferryboats around  Liverpool, his editorship of Encounter, and his embattled years  at Cambridge University.

Not Entitled; A Memoir

HarperCollins Publishers, Ltd

Renaissance Essays

Lawrence (Fontana Modern Masters)

HarperCollins, Publishers

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.

An Appetite for Poetry: Essays in Literary Interpretation

Modern Essays

Fontana Press

Not Entitled: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Harpercollins

The true biography of Shakespeare - and the only one we really need to care about - is in the plays. Sir Frank Kermode, Britain's most distinguished literary critic, has been thinking about them all his life. This book is a distillation of that lifetime's thinking. The great English tragedies were all written in the first decade of the seventeenth century. They are often in language that is difficult to us, and must have been hard even for contemporaries. How and why did Shakespeare's language develop as it did? Kermode argues that the resources of English underwent major change around 1600. The originality of Kermodes's writing, and the intelligence of his discussion, make this book a landmark.

Shakespeares Language

History & Criticism

Penguin Uk

The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

Oxford University Press

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