CHRISTOPHER RICKS

Christopher Ricks has been an officer in the Green Howards, a scholar of Balliol, a Fellow of Worcester, Professor of English at Bristol, King Edward VII Professor at Cambridge, and is now Warren Professor of Humanities at Boston University, Co- Director of its Editorial Institute, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is a scholar, critic and teacher of enormous distinction, who has a uniquely subtle critical imagination, a graceful, sensitive and stringent intelligence, which, allied with his profound scholarship, makes him an unrivalled lecturer. A lecture by Christopher Ricks is always an exciting, inspiring event.

His review of Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist in the New Statesman helped to launch Heaney’s career, and his review of Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings in the New York Review of Books helped to win a North American readership for Larkin’s poems. He has written with great insight and intelligence about Paul Muldoon in a compelling essay on Andrew Marvell in The Force of Poetry, and as his recent study of Bob Dylan, Dylan’s Visions of Sin, shows he is keenly aware of popular culture.

His critical study, Milton’s Grand Style (1963) challenged the surprisingly successful attempt of Eliot and Leavis to downgrade Milton’s poetry, and initiated the critical and scholarly reclaiming of Milton’s work which has taken place over the last four decades.

He has also published Tennyson (1972), Keats and Embarrassment (1974), The Force of Poetry (1984), T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988), Allusion to the Poets (2002), Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2003).He has published two anthologies: The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1987) and The Oxford Book of English Verse (1999). His edition of Tennyson is an outstanding work of scholarship. He has given the Lord Northcliffe Lectures at University College, London, the T.S. Eliot lectures at Kent, the Clarendon lectures at Oxford, the Clark lectures at Cambridge. He is also a tireless reviewer and literary journalist. If elected Professor of Poetry, he would combine his formal lectures with informal meetings to discuss poems by and with individual undergraduates and graduates. As a critic and scholar, Christopher Ricks belongs in what Matthew Arnold called ‘the glorious class of the best.’

Sir G.G. Roberts President of Wolfson J.A.E. Curtis Wolfson P. Giles Linacre K.F. Hilliard St Peter’s J.B. Lewis Wolfson T.N. Paulin Hertford J.H.W. Penney Wolfson J.H. Stallworthy Wolfson C.H. Tyerman Hertford R.J. Van Noordin Hertford