Allusion to the Poets

by Christopher Ricks

Overview

Christopher Ricks is among the best known living critics. His third collection of essays, several newly written for this book, is strongly focused on the theme of how writers—especially but not exclusively poets—make use of other writers' work: from the subtle courtesies of different kinds of allusion to the extreme discourtesy of plagiarism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199269150
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	03/28/2004
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 5.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Professor Christopher Ricks is Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University and co-director of the Editorial Institute. He has taught at Boston University since 1986; he was formerly King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. He is the general editor of two series, Penguin English Poets and Poets in Translation, and the co-editor of Essays in Criticism. In 2002 he will deliver the Panizzi Lectures in Bibliography at the British Library.
Ricks's books include:
(ed.) The Oxford Book of English Verse (OUP 1999)
Essays in Appreciation (OUP 1996)
(ed.) Inventions of the March Hare : Poems 1909-1917 by T. S. Eliot (Fabers 1996)
Beckett's Dying Words: The Clarendon Lectures, 1990 (OUP 1993)
(ed.) Longman annotated poets: Tennyson (Longman 1989)
T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (Fabers 1988)
(ed.) The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1987),
The Force of Poetry (OUP 1984)
Keats and Embarrassment (OUP 1974)
English Drama to 1710 (OUP 1971)#
Milton's Grand Style (OUP 1963)

Table of Contents

Prefatory Note

Editorial Reviews

"Ricks examines the transfer of poetic power in his brilliant and witty study.... Ricks [is] a painstaking scholar and editor as well as the most stringent and imaginative of close readers.... No other critic in our age...has dared to isolate this wonderfully ramifying, richly human subject [allusion]...and given it such intensive treatment. With this book about poets and their gratitude, Ricks has earned ours."—The Guardian

"Chistopher Ricks's Allusion to the Poets made it clear again just what is so great about a great literary critic."—Adam Phillips, Books of the Year, Observer Review

"[These] energetic essays [are] witty and engaging meditations...on the relationships between poem and cultural heritage.... A dazzling performance, especially considering the rapidity and variety of [Ricks's] references.... Consistently intellectual, challenging, and stimulating."—Choice

"Allusion to the Poets sparkles with an enjoyment that answers repeatedly to the delighted complexity and play of alert poetic imagination: for a long time to come, all good critics will be Christopher Ricks's heirs."—Peter McDonald, Times Literary Supplement

"Ricks is a remarkable literary critic, and this book explores the relationship of poets to their predecessors, extending in a new way the vein he mined in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice.... A lovely book, to be enjoyed and learned from, and not only, or even especially, by academics."—Virginia Quarterly Review

"[W]itty and engaging meditations (in the sense of prolonged thought) on the relationships between poem and cultural heritage. Ricks's writing style is close to that of an extempore lecture; the effect is a dazzling performance, especially considering the rapidity and variety of his references. Where else would one find identification of traces of Burns in Bob Dylan or such pithy responses as Rick's to Laura Rosenthal's Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England (1996)...Consistently intellectual, challenging, and stimulation, there are fine essays for the advanced scholar."—Choice

"[A] brilliant critic.... Ricks has valuable insights into the human psyche and the 'moral life.'"—P. N. Furbank, The Threepenny Review

From the Publisher