“It happens that in our phase of civility, the novel is the central form of literary art. It lends itself to explanations borrowed from any intellectual system of the universe which seems at the time satisfactory. Its history is an… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“Apocalypse is a part of the modern Absurd. This is testimony to its vitality, a vitality dependent upon its truth to the set of our fear and desire. Acknowledged, qualified by the scepticism of the clerks, it is--even when ironized,… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The first phase of modernism, which so far as the English language goes we associate with Pound and Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot and… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling him derivative, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if one wanted… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“I suppose it would be better if one were aggressive, contentious and so on. But there's rarely any occasion to be savage.” — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The novel, then, provides a reduction of the world different from that of the treatise. It has to lie. Words, thoughts, patterns of word… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The books which seal off the long perspectives, which sever us from our losses, which represent the world of potency as a world of… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The discords of our experience--delight in change, fear of change; the death of the individual and the survival of the species, the pains and… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the shift towards… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near. Consequently the historical allegory is always having to be revised;… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
“You sometimes hear people say, with a certain pride in their clerical resistance to the myth, that the nineteenth century really ended not in… — Frank Kermode Copy Share Image
