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Along Heroic Lines

By: Christopher Ricks

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Hardcover | 1 July 2021

At a Glance

Hardcover
350 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
14.5 x 22.4 x 2.8

Hardcover

$66.75

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A selection of new and revised essays from eminent scholar and critic Professor Christopher Ricks.

Christopher Ricks brings together new as well as substantially augmented critical essays across a wide range. Several derive from his term as the Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, when his inaugural lecture engaged with the illuminatingly puzzled relations between poetry and prose. Comparison and analysis (the tools of the critic, as T.S. Eliot insisted) are enlivened by imaginative pairings: of Samuel Johnson with Samuel Beckett, of Norman Mailer with Dickens, of Shakespeare with George Herbert, or of secret-police surveillance in Ben Jonson's Rome with that of Carmen Bugan's Romania.

Along Heroic Lines devotes itself to the heroic and to 'heroics' (Othello cross-examined by T.S. Eliot; Byron and role-playing; Ion Bugan, political protest and arrest). This knot is in tension with the English heroic line (Dryden's heroic triplets, Henry James's cadences, Geoffrey Hill's concluding book of prose-poems and how they choose to conclude). All alert to the balance and sustenance of alternate tones that prose and poetry can achieve in harmony.

Industry Reviews

[Rick's] magisterially assured account of the heroic, in the English heoic line (or the iambic pentameter) and in the heroic writer, amounts to an affirmation of the supreme body of writers and readers, spanning the centuries with the ebb and flow of their subtly modulated exchanges. ... it is richly absorbing * Dinah Birch, Times Literary Supplement *
The depth and delicacy of Ricks's critical tracery -- he both traces allusions and weaves them together -- are enough to make one feel stupid for not having seen it all before. * Colin Burrow, London Review of Books *
Ricks corrects easy critical assumptions in ways that would entertain any literature lover [... ] Ricks' close readings go beyond mere opinion: he is showing you exactly what the poet was up to. * John Mullan, Prospect *
Ricks, our greatest living critic, restores a world to coherence that seemed to be dissolving into the Twittersphere * Lee Oser, Literary Matters *
Full of verbal fireworks, witty quick-changing tones, highly stimulating to say the least. * William H. Pritchard, Hudson Review *

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