An Appetite for Poetry:

...are engaged in a continual critique of legitimacy...

...At the 1989 MLA convention in Washington D.C., a group of Native American poets and college teachers produced a panel of papers and poetry readings...

...Kermode refers to the inspired unity of the Bible (upon which he has produced much magisterial literary analysis) as "concealing behind its stories an occult plot which is a master version of the plot of our world...

...Later, while the panel performed Native American folk songs, they passed around an Indian drum to collect money to help defray the considerable personal expense each had incurred to travel to the convention...

...Kermode challenges the notion that literary theorists constitute an avant garde who will lead our generation out of anachronism, elitism, and error into a new, radical polity...

...an angel of reality....There dwelt the poet, watching the shining of the commonplace...

...In an essay that ingeniously connects Wallace Stevens with Hb'lderlin and Heidegger, he writes that for Stevens the world was "a place of ease, of 'Berlioz and roses'..., of postcards from Cuba, tea from Ceylon-fortuities of earth that solace us and make a world, or...

...You might also agree with him...

...Peggy R. Ellsberg If you read Frank Kermode's prologue to An Appetite for Poetry first, as the order of printed books suggests you should, you might conclude that he is curmudgeonly and even contentious in his argument against much of the current practice and teaching of "literary theory...

...In an essay called "The Plain Sense of Things," he calls upon Eliot, Freud, Augustine, Northrop Frye, George Herbert, and the Psalms to make his point...

...The volume is a collection often deeply learned and often brilliant essays on diverse literary and humanistic topics, including Milton in old age, Wallace Stevens in Connecticut, Freud, and others...

...maintains that the primary use of literature, however defined, is to serve the needs of Theory-indeed, the only reason for continuing the study of literature is that it can be pressed into this service...

...He also questions the assumption that literary theory, however radically will ever do the real work of social justice that women, minorities, and gays require: "There are probably more effective ways of drawing attention to political injustice than by deconstructing Hegel and Freud...

...Kermode demonstrates here how happy and unusual his own abilities are in reading variations in literary texts from the Greek Bible to E.M...

...He believes that a possible consequence of current literary theory is the destruction of reading...

...Here, he initiates his remarks with the complaint that "Theory...

...But what shines through in these delightful, profound, and moving essays is that Kermode is not simply a critic but also an artist...

...In fact, Kermode dismisses the idea that teaching and writing about literature is political at all-he recalls "the days when the editors of Tel Quel supposed they could help with the revolution by turning up at the Renault factory and reading their pieces to the workers over lunch...

...Likewise, I have noticed how often established university scholars-who regularly fill the middle of printed pages with typescript-are concerned with "marginality...

...Forster...

...The lengthy (forty-six pages) prologue-erudite, irritable, amused, meticulously documented, deliberately paced-is a polemic that dismisses with sophisticated reason a number of eminent critics and academicians, and leaves the rest of us humbled and shaken...

...In An Appetite for Poetry we encounter writing of balance and decorum, and reading of unflinching audacity.ing audacity...

...After this confrontational beginning, Kermode-one of England's most renowned literary critics-must prove that he can do better than the critics he castigates...

...So, with a sense of Kermode's love for poets, his soul-deep understanding of poetry and the wholeness of its projects, one can return to his prologue...

...He points out that literary theorists, "despite their occupancy of well-endowed chairs...

...The most fascinating essay in the book is "Divination," by whose title Kermode means making conjectures about the meanings of literature, "guessing by happy instinct or unusual insight...

...Now that everybody finds literary theory so much more interesting than literature," he says, "we must expect a certain amount of imperialist rapine...

...A serious and intelligent respect for literature is a necessary antidote, and it must be rein-troduced in university classrooms-for there alone, Kermode claims, is the desire to read acquired in modern times...

...At the beginning of the essay, however, Kermode implies that though the divination of literature is at once subtle and straightforward, artful and plain-in short, a delicate balance between talent and common sense-modern literary theorists have usurped it as a concept with armaments of their own technology...

...He does not disappoint...

...The MLA refused to fund this panel," someone pointed out, "because I think they had chosen to spend their allotment on another panel called 'Silence, Marginality, and Otherness in Native American Poetry.'" Whether or not that is exactly how the MLA proceeded, the anecdote illustrates Kermode's contention that the current crisis in literary criticism is "a matter for urgent consideration and action...

...He is a rock-solid scholar who knows that the historian writing about the political crisis of 1 658-1660 in a volume of the Oxford History of England was "exceptionally well acquainted with Milton's biography" (even though the historian mentions Milton only once in that volume...