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.