The ar tful noticer
Christopher Ricks is the most gifted and ingenious—sometimes over-ingenious— literary critic of his generation, argues John Mullan
Along Heroic Lines
by Christopher Ricks (Oxford University Press, £20)
Christopher Ricks has long had the reputation of being the most gifted academic literary critic writing in English. His gift has been to reveal the powers of great writers in brilliantly illuminated particulars: a phrase, a rhyme, a play on words. As he says in one of the essays in this new collection, “criticism is the art of noticing things that the rest of us may well not have noticed for ourselves, and might never have noticed.” He has seen new things in literary works that have been scrutinised many times: his early reputation was built on books about John Milton, Alfred Tennyson and John Keats. The best of his essays reveal (and it feels like revelation) what is singular about Marvell’s similes, say, or how the line endings work in The Prelude. Even better, Ricks often shows you something of which you had already been half-conscious but had never articulated. He is a consummate close reader, especially of poetry, always aided by his ear for literary echoes and allusions.
Now 88 years old, Ricks has been the most celebrated of close readers for more than half a century. I remember first becoming aware of him when he appeared on a TV chat show (Parkinson? Russell Harty?) in the mid-1970s, talking about Keats. Autre temps, autre moeurs. A year or two later, I was an earnest sixth former and our English teacher was playing us recordings of Ricks analysing Bob Dylan. At the time, this seemed pretty progressive for a literary prof. In fact, Ricks’s Dylanophilia would eventually produce what seems to me his one duff volume: 2003’s Dylan’s Visions of Sin, an exhausting analysis of his favourite Dylan songs. By far his longest book, it did little for his critical reputation, proving even to admirers that his critical ingenuity could become self-generating. Only a fellow Dylan worshipper can possibly put up with it.