Kermode's mind is never provincial. His most influential teacher, the brilliant alcoholic D. J. Gordon of Reading University, was reared in the cosmopolitan "Warburg" school of cultural interpretation, which excelled in the excavation of complex trans-national and transhistorical influences of the kind that are sketched here.

But the second thought is this. The vast majority of young lecturers in EngLit are profoundly uninterested in Forster. So Edwardian, so male, so English. Fodder only for articles with titles such as "Imperialism, class and the English country house in Howards End" or "Masculinity amalgamated: colonialism, homosexuality and Forster's Kipling." The very idea of a cosy causerie bringing Forster into alignment with Richard Crashaw, Matthew Arnold and Evelyn Underhill would be anathema to most youthful members of Kermode's profession (outside Oxford and Cambridge).

Why so? Because those junior colleagues entered the academic profession during the Age of Theory. And who did more than anyone else to domesticate French Literary Theory in the late 1960s and '70s? Frank Kermode.

From the very beginning of his academic career, Kermode has been interested in how literary texts work as systems, how they create autonomous worlds that in important senses stand apart from the real world. His first book, published in 1952, was an anthology called English Pastoral Poetry from the Beginnings to Marvell (W. W. Norton). In a remarkable introduction, written under the influence of the maverick critic William Empson, Kermode argued that pastoral is in some sense the defining literary form because the enclosed second world that it creates — Shakespeare's Forest of Arden, Andrew Marvell's imaginary gardens — is an analogue for the literary work itself. It is a line of argument that anticipated the words of Paul de Man, high priest of literary Deconstruction, by some 30 years: "There is no doubt that the pastoral theme is, in fact, the only poetic theme."

Kermode followed up, and established his reputation, with the 1954 Arden Shakespeare edition of The Tempest, the work that perfectly illustrates this theme, via the analogy between the play itself and the magical island where it is set. Again, the introduction was magisterial, offering hugely influential treatments of black versus white magic and the debate between art and nature. A couple of years later came Romantic Image (Routledge), a book that Kermode later said he dashed off in six weeks one summer because he wanted to explain to himself the origin and context of W. B. Yeats's great line, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"