While recovering from a mental collapse in a Swiss sanitarium in 1921, T. S. Eliot finished what became the definitive poem of the modern condition, one that still casts a large and ominous shadow over twentieth-century poetry. Built upon the imagery of the Grail legend, the Fisher King, and anc[...]

Frank Kermode is one of our most distinguished and beloved critics of English literature. Here, he contributes a new epilogue to his collection of classic lectures on the relationship of fiction to age-old concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis. Prompted by the approach of the millennium, he revi[...]

A magnum opus from our finest interpreter of The Bard.Frank Kermode, Britain's most distinguished scholar of sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century literature, here restores Shakespeare's poetic language to its rightful primacy. How did this language develop? Something extraordinary happened in S[...]

For the past four decades Frank Kermode, critic and writer, has steadily established himself as one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. Questioning the public's harsh perception of 'the artist', Kermode at the same time gently pokes fun at artists' own, often inflated, self-image. He iden[...]

Frank Kermode has long held a distinctive place among modern critics. He brings to the study of literature a fine and fresh critical intelligence that is always richly suggestive, never modish. He offers here an inquiry--elegant in conception and style--into the art of interpretation. His subject qu[...]