Frank Kermode

From the London Review dated 7 September 2006

‘It’s the way people like us don’t talk’

This memoir takes its title and its epigraph from Wordsworth:

I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.

The poet laureate thus salutes a distinguished predecessor. Yet there is nothing particularly Wordsworthian about Andrew Motion’s book. The only character who uses the expression ‘in the blood’ is the poet’s father, and what he means is that when the time comes Andrew is bound to enjoy hunting. There is little evidence here of childish wildness or wickedness, no hint of Wordsworth’s animating discipline of fear – ‘more like a man/Flying from something that he dreads, than one/Who sought the thing he loved’ – and even less in the way of ‘aching joys’ and ‘dizzy raptures’. [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography