Great Regulars: [Frank Kermode] was one of the last exemplars

of an ideal that dates back at least to Matthew Arnold: the ideal of the literary critic as the humanist par excellence. What gave the critic his special authority was the way that he thought and wrote at the intersection--of the classics and the contemporary world, of literature and society, of the academy and the common reader. As Kermode recognized, few professors of English aspire to that kind of role anymore: "This is an age of theory, and theory is both difficult and usually not related to anything that meets the wider interest I speak of."

from Adam Kirsch: Slate: The Literary Critic as Humanist: Frank Kermode, 1919-2010, exemplified an ideal that is dying.
then Frank Kermode: Telegraph: A memory for poetry

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