John Mullan in The Guardian, writing the obituary of the critic Frank Kermode, who died on Tuesday aged ninety, recalls the book which secured his reputation, written more than fifty years ago.

Romantic Image (1957) was “an account of the continuities between Romanticism and Modernism, with the poetry of Yeats at its heart. With its easy erudition, but not a footnote in sight, this book seems a long way from today’s average academic output,” Mullan writes. “In range it is huge, reaching into European and classical literature, aesthetic philosophy as well as poetry, verse from the Renaissance as well as the 19th and 20th centuries – yet in tone it is modest, provisional (it calls itself an essay). Learning with a certain lightness was his style.

“The year after the publication of Romantic Image, Kermode became professor of English at Manchester University, where he worked until 1965. From then on, he gave much of his energy to the writing of reviews and essays. Some of those from the late 1950s and the 60s were collected and published in Puzzles and Epiphanies (1962) and Continuities (1968). It is strange to think that the New Statesman and the Spectator once published pieces as freighted with reading as these. Kermode himself wrote in the introduction to the latter volume that any literary journalism that was able to satisfy non-specialist interests ‘without loss of intellectual integrity’ was ‘more demanding than most of what passes for scholarship’. He was to continue to think this, and to write wonderfully well in this form.”

The literary journal with which Kermode was most associated in the last decades of his life was the London Review of Books. He also contributed to the New York Review of Books. In an anthology of some of the pieces he wrote for these journals during the 1990s, Pleasing Myself (2001), Kermode gave an account of the requirements of the “review-essay”, the genre in which, latterly, he specialised and at which he was so adept.

The form is, he noted the speciality of literary reviews and can run to “anything from 2,500 to 4,500 words” (a bit longer in the drb on occasions).

“It is in my view a satisfactory genre, for the writer can be moderately expansive and please himself, as well as modestly explanatory and willing to please, with due amenity, the sort of reader who reads these journals. It is almost true to say that this middle ground between the barbarous jargons and swollen books of the modern academy and the quick satisfactions of the newspaper review is nowadays cultivated only by a few journals like these, and it is just as well for our intellectual well-being that they should exist. The understanding between writer and reader is that the former will perform as an educated audience has a right to expect, and that the latter will, under those conditions, take pleasure in what may from time to time be a mildly strenuous bit of reading, justified by a faith that authors who write for these papers on the whole know what they are talking about, but are not so proud of that accomplishment that they cannot refrain from vainglorious displays of their professional prowess.”

A good recipe, and something to attempt to at least partially live up to.

Read John Mullan's obituary of Sir Frank Kermode here: