Christopher Ricks

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Sir

Christopher Bruce Ricks

FBA
Born (1933-09-18) 18 September 1933 (age 90)
Beckenham, United Kingdom
OccupationCritic, scholar, professor
NationalityBritish
Alma materBalliol College, Oxford
GenreLiterary criticism
Notable awards2003 Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award

Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks

Association of Literary Scholars and Critics
. He is known as a champion of
W. K. Wimsatt, Christina Stead). Hugh Kenner praised his "intent eloquence",[4] and Geoffrey Hill his "unrivalled critical intelligence".[5] W. H. Auden described Ricks as "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding".[6] John Carey calls him the "greatest living critic".[7]

Life

He was born in Beckenham, the younger son of James Bruce Ricks, who worked for the family overcoat manufacturing firm, and Gabrielle (née Roszak), daughter of a furrier of French origin.[8][9][10] Ricks was educated at King Alfred's School, Wantage[11] (a near-contemporary of the jockey Lester Piggott), then – as the first of his family to attend university –[10] studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first in his B.A. in English in 1956, a B.Litt. in 1958, and M.A. in 1960.[11] 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.

During his time at Bristol he worked on

New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.[12]

He was knighted in the 2009 Birthday Honours.[13]

Principles against theory

Ricks has distinguished himself as a vigorous upholder of traditional principles of reading based on

New Critical literary theory, to which he prefers the Johnsonian
principle.

In an important essay,[14] he contrasts principles derived empirically from a close parsing of texts, a tradition whose great exemplar was Samuel 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 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

epistemological
fault-lines are relentlessly subjected to ostensible "exposure".

Works

  • A Dissertation Upon English Typographical Founders and Founderies 1778 by Edward Rowe Mores (1961) editor with Harry Carter
  • Milton's Grand Style (1963)
  • Poems and Critics (1966) anthology
  • The Life and Opinions of
    Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
     (1967) editor with Graham Petrie
  • Twentieth Century Views: A. E. Housman (1968) editor
  • Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained by John Milton (1968) editor
  • English Poetry and Prose 1540–1674 (1970) editor
  • English Drama To 1710 (1971) editor
  • The Brownings: Letters and Poetry (1970) editor
  • Tennyson
     (1972)
  • A Collection of Poems By
    Alfred Tennyson
     (1972) editor
  • Selected Criticism of Matthew Arnold (1972) editor
  • Keats
    and Embarrassment     (1974)
  • Geoffrey Hill and the Tongue's Atrocities (1978)
  • The State of the Language (1979) editor with Leonard Michaels, later edition 1990
  • The Force of Poetry (1984) essays
  • The Poems of
    Tennyson
     (1987) three volumes, editor
  • The
    Tennyson
    Archive     (from 1987) editor with Aidan Day, 31 volumes
  • The
    New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse
     (1987) editor
  • T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988)
  • A. E. Housman: Collected Poems and Selected Prose (1988) editor
  • The Faber Book of America (1992) editor with William L. Vance
  • The Golden Treasury (1991) editor
  • Beckett's Dying Words (1993)
  • Essays in Appreciation (1996)
  • Inventions of the March Hare: Poems, 1909–1917 by T. S. Eliot (1996) editor
  • The
    Oxford Book of English Verse
     (1999) editor
  • Allusion to the Poets (2002)
  • Selected Poems of James Henry (2002) editor
  • Reviewery (2003) essays
  • Dylan's Visions of Sin (2003)
  • Decisions and Revisions in T. S. Eliot (2003)
  • Samuel Menashe: Selected Poems (2005) editor
  • True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound (2010)
  • The Poems of T. S. Eliot (2015) editor with Jim McCue, 2 volumes
  • Along Heroic Lines (2021)

Footnotes

  1. ISSN 0261-3077
    . Retrieved 8 September 2023.
  2. ^ Michael Gray (2006), The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, p. 571.
  3. ^ A collection is in Reviewery.
  4. ^ Hugh Kenner, A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers, Knopf, New York 1988, p. 245
  5. ^ Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings, OUP, Oxford 2008, p. 379
  6. ^ Oxford Book of English Verse, ed. Ricks, OUP 1999
  7. ^ "John Carey in conversation with Clive James". clivejames.com. Archived from the original on 19 January 2012. Retrieved 8 September 2023.
  8. ^ The International Who's Who 1996-97. Europa Publications, 1996; p. 1298
  9. ^ Contemporary Literary Critics, Elmer Borklund, Palgrave Macmillan, 1977, p. 445
  10. ^ a b "Profile: Christopher Ricks". The Guardian. 29 January 2005.
  11. ^ a b Contemporary Literary Critics, Elmer Borklund, Palgrave Macmillan, 1977, p. 445
  12. ^ "The professoriate" Archived 11 May 2013 at the Wayback Machine, New College of the Humanities, accessed 8 June 2011.
  13. ^ "No. 59090". The London Gazette (Supplement). 13 June 2009. p. 1.
  14. ^ "Literary Principles as against theory", in Christopher Ricks, Essays in Appreciation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, pp. 311–332, p. 312.

External links

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