How are we supposed to decide which books to regard as classics?

From Seer Blest by Sam Sacks

Kermode’s justifications for his borrowing from Judaism’s ancient critical method appears in the lectures compiled for his 1975 book The Classic. Here he asks how, in the secular era, we are supposed to decide which books to regard as classics.

The question is knotty, Kermode writes, because traditionally such literature was known by its revealed grace. Virgil was a classic because, in one of his eclogues, he foreshadowed the birth of Christ. But Virgil also wrote the founding epic of the divinely appointed Roman Empire—and he was preceded by Homer and followed by numerous other poets, from Dante to Milton, whose greatness rested on their prophetic vision of “certain, unchanging truths.”

T.S. Eliot, in a similar set of lectures twenty years earlier, had done his best to uphold this standard for classics, but Kermode recognized that it had lost currency in modern times, in which engraved verities have faded and “truth in art … will have the hesitancy, the instability, of the attitude struck by the New World, provincial and unstable itself, towards the corrupt maturity of the metropolis.” By compelling the classic to adapt with the shifting times, Kermode was inverting its very function. In the past, it was a repository for ultimate answers; now it is determined based on its ability to field the most questions, to enrich the most diverse forms of inquiry.

In essence (though Kermode was suspicious of essences), this is an argument for plurality, for an idea of a classic that does not require any special dispensation in order to understand it. Kermode passionately advocated for the deathless relevance of traditional masterpieces while opposing the tyranny of elect knowledge. It was this combination of conservatism and progressiveness that made him such a unique defender of structuralism, poststructuralism, and the other New Wave schools of literary theory that were cropping up more and more as his career continued.

So a classic in the past was a "repository for ultimate answers; now it is determined based on its ability to field the most questions, to enrich the most diverse forms of inquiry." Whether right or wrong it is at least a proposition.