In response to Eliot's question 'what is a classic?' Kermode delivered the 1973 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, weaving in and out of the works of Virgil, Spenser, Marvell, Milton, Hawthorne, and Emily Bronte, amongst others (even including Barthes and Foucault). It is a tour de force, dated only perhaps by that expectation that an intelligent reader would be fluent in Latin (all chapter headings are in Latin), French, and perhaps another language or two. The failure of a post-modern society to provide thaat education all but precludes us from Eliot's classicism! But, that aside, Kermode's is a journey through the great questions of reading, the questions of authorial intention and control, and the questions of earning a place in the canon of classic literature. ( )