Allusion to the Poets
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Allusion to the words and phrases of ancestral voices is one of the hiding-places of poetry's power. Poets appreciate the great debts that they owe to previous poets, and are often duly and newly grateful. Allusion to the Poets consists of twelve essays - four published here for the first time - on allusion and its relations, in particular on the use that poets in English have made of the very words of poets in English.The first half of the book, on 'The Poet as Heir', consists of six chapters devoted to individual poets, Augustan, Romantic, and Victorian: Dryden and Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Tennyson. Allusion is always a form of inheritance, not to be hoarded or squandered. The critical and creative question is its imaginative co-operation with other kinds of legacy - with whatever for a particular poet or for a particular time is judged to be an unignorable inheritance: of a throne, perhaps, or of land; of intermixed languages; of the human senses; of money; of literature itself; or of our planet, long-lived but not eternal.
The second half of the book is six essays on allusion's affiliations: to plagiarism (allusion being plagiarism's responsible opposite); to metaphor (allusion being a form that metaphor may take); to loneliness in poetry (allusion constituting company); to allusion within poetry to prose (on A E. Housman); to translation as exercising allusion (on David Ferry); and to the clash between one poet's practice and his critical principles (on Yvor Winters).
Features
- Christopher Ricks, one of the greatest living critics of literature, in sparkling and trenchant form
- This third collection of his essays - several never before published - concentrates on literary inheritance: the significance of allusion to particular poets, its relations with metaphor, its crucial differences from translation and from plagiarism
- The essays range from Dryden and Pope to Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson, and forward to Housman and Yvor Winters
Reviews
"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
"A monument to a whole waning era of professional reading. A monument, all right-but a functioning archive still, and a treasure trove.... A riveting achievement.... The lesson of Ricks's book couldn't be clearer. Debt is the mother of beauty. Which is a good enough motto for a continued return to his own stirring work."--Modern Language Quarterly
"[A] brilliant critic.... Ricks has valuable insights into the human psyche and the 'moral life.'"--P. N. Furbank, The Threepenny Review
"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
About the Author(s)
Professor Christopher Ricks is Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University and co-director of the Editorial Institute. His books include Essays in Appreciation , Beckett's Dying Words , and The Force of Poetry .
