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 identifies what has become one of the defining characteristics of the Romantic tradition - the artist in isolation and the emerging power of the imagination. Back in print after an absence of over a decade, The Romantic Image is quintessential Kermode. Enlightenment has seldom been so...

Here are all of Stevens' published books of poetry, side-by-side for the first time with the haunting lyrics of his later years and early work that traces the development of his art. From the rococo inventiveness of Harmonium, his first volume (including such classics as "Sunday Morning", "Peter Quince at the Clavier", and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"), through "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction", "Esthetique du Mal", "The Auroras of Autumn", and the other large-scale masterpieces of his middle years, to the austere final poems of "The Rock", Stevens' poetry explores with...

The true biography of Shakespeare - and the only one we really need to care about - is in the plays. Sir Frank Kermode, Britain's most distinguished literary critic, has been thinking about them all his life. This book is a distillation of that lifetime's thinking. The great English tragedies were all written in the first decade of the seventeenth century. They are often in language that is difficult to us, and must have been hard even for contemporaries. How and why did Shakespeare's language develop as it did? Kermode argues that the resources of English underwent major change around 1600....