The Force of Poetry - Softcover

Ricks, Christopher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 019282046X ISBN 13: 9780192820464

Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks, 1987

Synopsis

"As critic and scholar he calls tremendously on his knowledge of literature past and present to provide new insights, aspects and illuminations....Ricks looks at poetry over a considerable range, a lively critic who assures us through clarifying analysis of its power and force in our lives."--The New York Times Book Review. "A work of enormous brilliance."--Encounter. "The richness and variety of these essays is truly remarkable."--Listener. Though published independently over many years, each of these penetrating essays asks how a poet's words reveal "the force of poetry"--that force, in Dr. Johnson's words, "which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter." The poets treated here range from John Gower to Robert Lowell, and include Marvell, Milton, Johnson, Wordsworth, Philip Larkin, and Geoffrey Hill. Ricks has also added four essays on general topics: on cliches, on lies, on misquotations, and on American literature in its relation to the transitory. The Force of Poetry reveals the quality of Ricks's criticism that W.H. Auden responded to when he described him as "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding."

About this title

Review

Christopher Ricks is our most distinctive critic...the natural heir to Empson, exciting and fertile. (Blake Morrison, Observer)

The richness and variety of these essays is truly remarkable (John Bayley, Listener)

About the Author

Christopher Ricks is one of the best-known living critics of English, and was described by W. H. Auden as 'the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding' He is author of Beckett's Dying Words (OUP, 1993) Keats and Embarrassment (OUP, 1974) and editor of The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Oxford, 1987)

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 019282046X
• ISBN 13: 9780192820464
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464