Frank Kermode (1919–2010)

This year I have been reading several books by writers from the Romantic Period and some books about this period too, and I thought Romantic image would be a nice edition to that. However, I was very disappointed with this books and even irritated.

First of all, it is not the first time I have heard the suggestion that the Romantic period is not finished, although I think my tutors who brought this idea up got it from this book by Kermode. Frank Kermode was really a big name at that time.

Generally, the Romantic period refers to the writings of the period of the late Eighteenth century till the end of the first quarter of the Nineteenth century, with writers such as Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Wordsworth, etc. In Romantic image Kermode suggests that the Romantic period is not finished and that for example Yeats belongs to this epoch.

What I don't like about Romantic image is that it barely pays attention to they traditional poets of what is convetionally considered to be the romantic period, while focussing on outliers and obscure writers. There seems to be a lot of names-dropping and high-brow elitism in this book.… (more)

his is a monography on the poet Wallace Stevens by the reknowned scholar Frank Kermode. It is a bit tricky to buy a critical work on a poet with whose work I am unfamiliar, and may likely not be interested in. However, this is a short work of almost essay-like length of just 126 pages.

Kermode makes some poignent observations about the role and nature of reality as seen by Wallace Stevens that struck me and stuck with me.

reality is what you see finely and imagine fully from where you are and as what you are. 'The Gods of China are always Chinese' is one of the fundamental ideas of Wallace Stevens (p.11). "I am what is around me" (p.35).

At least in his poetry, Stevens creates a divide between reality and the world of the imagination, effectively cutting himself off from life. To most people life is an affair of people and not of places. Instead, he says, life is an affair of places, and elsewhere Life is not people and scene but thought and feeling.

This culminates in the horrific observation that reality is in fact unbearable to us, that we cannot truly face it, and that we can only live with it through the overlay of our imagination. In The Snow Man "winter" is a metaphor for a "pure abstracted reality, a bare icy outline purged clean of all the accretions brought by the human mind to make it possible for us to conceive of reality and live our lives." In winter, things are seen as they are. (p. 31).

In the same context, Stevens wrote: "No doubt there is nothing more morbid in itself, more inimical to nature, than to see things as they are.... The real, in its pure state, stops the heart instantaneously .... O, Socrates, the universe cannot for one instant endure to be only what it is ... " (p. 32) from Stevens' introduction to Valéry's Dance and the Soul.

The imagination is described as a power to transform the environment and ensure comfort and survival. " Poets, with this power, once made gods and myths, but these are irrelevant to modern reality. Now the same power must be our defense against the poverty of fact" (p. 36) (Italics are mine).

This bleak view that pits the harsh world of Darwinian biology against culture as a soft blanket to delude ourselves by shying away from harsh reality is incredibly convincing to me.

I did not much care for the poetry of Wallace Stevens, but believe Kermode provides an excellent introduction to Stevens' overall output, mainly poetry, and dedicates one chapter to his prose works. To me, reading the critical sections underlying Stevens ideas was what made reading this book so valuable to me.… (more)