The Force of Poetry

by Christopher Ricks

"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 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."

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Writing, Criticism, Literature, Essays

464 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks, FBA, is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (U.S.) and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (England) from 2004 to 2009. 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'.