Frank Kermode on his love of poetry and poets

Today the Telegraph reprinted highly lauded (and recently deceased) British critic Frank Kermode’s elegant 1974 essay, “A memory for poetry.” Kermode considers why loving a poet is enchanting and all-consuming; he draws on his own internal affairs with Wallace Stevens and Yeats. Kermode’s precision of language and depth of insight in this piece is evidence of his legacy as a landmark critic and essayist.

From the Telegraph:

Indeed, the experience of being in love with a poet is hardly to be had from a single poem or even from a small body of work; thus one may admire, even revere, Marvell, but that isn’t the same thing. There is a different kind of mystery in a voluminous poet.

You may begin by admiring certain discrete poems or even certain lines, but when he goes deep into your mind many things that did not consciously impress you arrive in the more occult part of the memory and establish themselves, eventually, as the real secret and enchanting things while the obvious attractions, which are more or less available to everybody, come to seem superficial.