Christopher Ricks

Christopher Ricks. Courtesy Un-Gyve Press.

Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks, FBA (born 18 September 1933) is a British literary critic and academic.

Life

Overview

Ricks lives in the United State, where he is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities, and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University. He is the immediate past-president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious (Marshall McLuhan, Christopher Norris, Geoffrey Hartman, Stanley Fish); and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous (F.R. Leavis, W.K. Wimsatt, Christina Stead). Hugh Kenner has praised his 'intent eloquence', and Geoffrey Hill his 'unrivalled critical intelligence'. W. H. Auden described Ricks as 'exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding'. John Carey calls him the 'greatest living critic'.

Youth

He was born in Beckenham and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first in English. He served in the Green Howards in the British Army in 1953/4 in Egypt. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Worcester College, Oxford, moving in 1968, after a sabbatical year at Stanford University, to become Professor of English at the University of Bristol.

Academic career

During his time at Bristol he worked on Keats and Embarrassment (1974), in which he made the then revelatory connection between the letters and the poetry. It was also at Bristol that he first published his still-definitive edition of Tennyson's poetry. In 1975, Ricks moved to the University of Cambridge, where he was King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, before leaving for Boston University in 1986. In June 2011 it was announced he would join the professoriate of New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.

Writing

Criticism

Ricks has distinguished himself as a vigorous upholder of traditional principles of reading based on practical criticism. He has opposed the theory-driven hermeneutics of the post-structuralist and postmodernist. This places him outside the post-New Critical literary theory, to which he prefers the Johnsonian principle.

In an important essay, he contrasts principles derived empirically from a close parsing of texts, a tradition whose great exemplar was Dr. Johnson, to the fashionable mode for philosophical critique that deconstructs the 'rhetorical' figures of a text and, in doing so, unwittingly disposes of the values and principles underlying the art of criticism itself. 'Literature', he argues, 'is, among other things, principled rhetoric'. The intellectualist bias of professional theorists cannot but make their strenuously philosophical readings of literary texts discontinuous with the subject matter.

Practical criticism is attuned to both the text and the reader's own sensibility, and thus engages in a nuanced dialogue between the complex discursive resonances of words in any literary work and the reader's correlative sentiments as they have been informed by a long experience of the self within both the world and literature. In this subtle negotiation between the value-thick sensibility of the reader and the intertextual resonances of a literary work lies the tactful attunement of all great criticism. This school of criticism must remain leery of critical practices that come to the text brandishing categorical, schematic assumptions, any panoply of tacitly assumed precepts external to the practical nature of literary creativity. Otherwise, the risk is one of a theoretical hybris, of a specious detachment that assumes a certain critical superiority to the text and its author. Those theory-saturated critics who engage with texts that, by their nature, are compact of social and political judgements (and much more), assert covertly a privileged innocence, an innocence denied to the text under scrutiny, whose rhetorical biases, and epistemological fault-lines are relentlessly subjected to ostensible 'exposure'.

Recognition

Ricks was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 2004 to 2009.

He was knighted in the 2009 Birthday Honours.

Publications

Non-fiction

• Milton's Grand Style. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1963.
• Tennyson's Methods of Composition. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.
• Tennyson. London & New York: Macmillan, 1972.
• Keats and Embarrassment. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press / New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
• Geoffrey Hill and the Tongue's Atrocities: The W.D. Thomas memorial lecture. Swansea, UK: University College of Swansea, 1978.
• The Force of Poetry (essays). Oxford, UK, & New York: Clarendon Press, 1984.
• T.S. Eliot and Prejudice. Berkeley, CA, & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988; London: Faber, 1988.
• Beckett's Dying Words: The Clarendon lectures, 1990. Oxford, UK, & New York: Clarendon Press, 1993.
• Essays in Appreciation. Oxford, UK, & New York: Clarendon Press, 1996.
• Allusion to the Poets. Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Reviewery (essays). New York: Handsel Books, 2001; London: Penguin, 2003.
• Dylan's Visions of Sin. London: Viking, 2003; New York: Ecco Press, 2004.
• Decisions And Revisions In T.S. Eliot. London: Faber, 2003.
• True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell under the Sign of Eliot and Pound. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

Edited

• A Dissertation Upon English Typographical Founders and Founderies 1778 by Edward Rowe Mores (1961) editor with Harry Carter
• Poems and Critics: An anthology of poetry and cricism from Shakespeare to Hardy. London & Glasgow, 1966.
• Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (edited with Graham Petrie). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1967.
• A.E. Housman: A collection of critical essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
• John Milton, Paradise Lost / Paradise Regained. New York: New American Library, 1968.
• English Poetry and Prose 1540–1674. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1970.
• English Drama To 1710. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1971.
• Robert Browning & Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Brownings: Letters and Poetry. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970.
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, A Collection of Poems. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972.
• Matthew Arnold, Selected Criticism. New York: New American Library, 1972.
• The State of the Language" 1990's edition (edited with Leonard Michaels). Berkely, CA, Los Angeles, & London: Berkeley, CA: later edition 1990
• The Poems of Tennyson (3 volumes), Harlow, Essex, UK: Longman, 1987; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987.
• The Tennyson Archive (from 1987) editor with Aidan Day, 31 volumes
• The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
• A.E. Housman: Collected poems and selected prose (1988) editor
• Francis Turner Palgrave, The Golden Treasury: Of the best songs and lyrical poems in the English language . London & New York: Penguin, 1991.
• The Faber Book of America (edited with William L. Vance). London & Boston: Faber, 1992.
• T.S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems, 1909–1917. London: Faber, 1996; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996.
• The Oxford Book of English Verse. Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• James Henry, Selected Poems. New York: Handsel, 2002; Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2002.
• Samuel Menashe, Selected Poems. New York: Library of American, 2005.
• Joining Music with Reason: 34 poets, 34 poets, British and American, Oxford 2004-2009. Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, UK, & Baltimore, MD: Waywiser Press, 2010.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of literary critics

Preceded by Paul Muldoon

Oxford Professor of Poetry 2004-2009

Succeeded by Geoffrey Hill

External links

• Editorial Institute
• "Bringing it all back home", profile of Ricks at The Guardian
• Christopher Ricks Playlist Appearance on WMBR's Dinnertime Sampler radio show 13 October 2004