The first of two talks by Frank Kermode

The seventeenth-century 'dissociation of sensibility... from which we have never recovered' (in T.S. Eliot's successful formulation) should be seen, Mr. Kermode suggests, as a local variant of the doctrine of the Renaissance as a great spiritual disaster. 'The myth of catastrophe,' he argues, 'was imposed upon English literature not after a dispassionate survey of the facts but in order to satisfy certain needs that became urgent in the nineteenth century'.

(The recorded broadcast of Oct. 27)