Frank Kermode, 1919–2010

Frank Kermode had always insisted that he arrived at a career in literary criticism—a career that earned him a knighthood and consensus acclaim as the pre-eminent critic of his era—largely by default. He wrote in his memoir, Not Entitled, that he was incapable of figuring out “how very complicated things are done,” and thus was not cut out for writing plays or novels or anything else with a plot. Also aware that his poetry “wasn’t up to much,” he concluded that “there was nothing left for me except to become a critic, preferably with a paying job in a university.”

For a man of letters, Kermode came from an “unpromising background,” said The New York Times. Born on the Isle of Man to a warehouse worker and a waitress, Kermode was, in his own description, “fat, plain, shortsighted, clumsy, idle, dirty,” and “very unlikely to add to the family store of sporting cups and medals.” But he was quick-witted, winning scholarships to high school and Liverpool University, from which he graduated in 1940. He spent six years in the Royal Navy, then took up a series of teaching posts in England and the U.S.

“Learning with a certain lightness was his style,” said the London Guardian. Arriving at England’s Reading University in 1949, he tasted literary success for the first time when he edited a 1951 edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest that is “still the standard version for undergraduates.” His introduction to that edition is vintage Kermode, blending a scholar’s meticulousness with “a deep knowledge of Renaissance literature to make vivid the intellectual life of the play.” Indeed, his specialty was “unraveling the ways in which ideas worked in literature,” particularly in the work of cerebral, self-consciously difficult poets such as John Donne and Wallace Stevens. Kermode wrote in an approachable style, in keeping with his determination to produce criticism that fellow scholars would respect while it remained accessible to nonspecialists.

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As he grew older, Kermode became dismayed by “the widening gulf between academic ideas about literature and the experience of books had by the ordinary reader,” said the London Daily Telegraph. “Always open-minded,” in the 1960s and ’70s he was one of the first mainstream scholars in England to take an interest in postmodernist literary theories such as structuralism and deconstruction, which held that “a text might have an infinite number of equally valid meanings.” But he later soured on the opacity of much postmodern criticism and took to “castigating the gibberish written by many proponents of these new ideas.” Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1973, he was knighted for his services to literature in 1991.