Introduction

Frank Kermode was born in 1919 and has held professorships in modern English literature at University College, London, and at Cambridge. He was Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard in 1977–78. A contributor to many magazines and journals, Kermode was coeditor of Encounter and editor of the Fontana Masterguides and Modern Masters series. His books include Romantic Image (1957); John Donne (1957); Oxford Anthology of English Literature (1973); Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (1975); An Appetite for Poetry (1989); Uses of Error (1991); The Oxford Book of Letters (1995); his memoirs, Not Entitled (1996); Shakespear's Language (2000); Pieces of my Mind (2003); and The Age of Shakespeare (2004). A Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Arts Council from 1968 to 1971, Kermode was knighted in 1991. He has approved the use of this material.

Preface by Frank Kermode (1970)

When we speak of art, we assume that there is a long historical interrelation between “high” art and its audience: the audience understands the language, or the code, and the artist presumes on this understanding to enlarge the language in the confidence that there exists an audience that will undertake to scan the new thing. This power to scan the new thing is learned, of course, from existing art, so there is a continuity both of the audience and of the forms of art. Occasionally, there are changes more violent than usual, and the thread is broken or seems to be, but in the long run both continuities are reestablished: the languages of art persist, and so does a public.

But many people would now call such views wrong, including some artists. People who think this way may not simply agree that their acceptance of present art depends in some measure on a past of which they may know nothing. They would not even be interested to know that their opinion was first voiced, with a different intonation but very forcibly, more than fifty years ago by the Dadaists. Their program—more than any other—is now being given an extensive trial. The abolition of the past and of the artist, the violation of codes and expectations—these belong now to a new world where there are new media and new interpretations of what goes on in these media.