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Topic: Christopher Ricks

	Guardian Unlimited Books \| Review \| Profile: Christopher Ricks
		Ricks has been described as holding in his head all of English poetry, and to see him lecture is to see him repeatedly reach into this apparently infinite database for the most subtle and apposite comparisons, echoes and rebuttals.
		Ricks was born in Beckenham, Kent, in 1933.
		Ricks went up to Balliol College in 1953 to read English, and still delights in stories about eccentric Oxford figures, such as a mean tutor who sat so close to his meagre fire "that every now and then there would be a smell of burning tweed and he would have to put himself out".
	books.guardian.co.uk /review/story/0,12084,1400084,00.html (4120 words)

	FT October 2004: Books in Review (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		For Ricks’ purposes, then, it is not necessary that a sin be specifically attacked or (scandalously) practiced in the course of a song—it may be the notable absence of that sin, or some surprising resistance to it, that constitutes its presence.
		Ricks allows from the outset that he sees his job as "prizing songs, not as prizing-open minds." (Such wordplay is one of Ricks’ charms.) Ricks is not trying to argue with convinced non-aficionados and dedicated deniers of Dylan’s poetic worth.
		Ricks’ broader achievement is to illustrate and explicate how Dylan’s chosen words fall upon the ear and wend their way into the heart in their peculiar and beguiling fashion.
	www.firstthings.com /ftissues/ft0410/reviews/curnyn.htm (1099 words)

	Professor revels in Dylan's poetry \| www.azstarnet.com ®
		Ricks, 70, born in Britain and educated at Oxford, is a professor's professor.
		Ricks' writing style is not unlike his conversational style: witty, allusive, punning (in the book, for example, he talks about a "creche course" and "bed-rheumy eyes"), digressive and free-ranging, darting off to make connections that are sometimes baffling but more often surprising and provocative.
		Ricks first became aware of Dylan's music while he was teaching at the University of California-Berkeley, in 1965, but in those days he was only "hearing" the songs, he said, not "listening" to them.
	www.azstarnet.com /sn/printDS/28304 (922 words)

	Boston.com / News / Education / Higher education / The Dylanist
		Ricks, a professor of humanities at Boston University and one of the most widely admired living critics of English-language poetry, says he has never taught a course on Bob Dylan, but it is probably just as accurate to say that since the late 1960s he has never taught a course not on Bob Dylan, either.
		Ricks believes that Dylan has always been a writer of religious songs -- since long before his "born-again" phase of the late '70s -- and that the seven deadly sins, along with the four cardinal virtues and the three heavenly graces, provide a useful starting point for an appreciation of his art.
		Ricks, of course, is not the first fan to subject Dylan's lyrics to microscopic scrutiny, even at book-length.
	www.boston.com /news/education/higher/articles/2003/10/19/the_dylanist (1763 words)

	Zimmerman bound or unbound? Spectator, The - Find Articles
		Christopher Ricks, the world's leading critic of poetry in English, Frank Kermode and the American Helen Vendler his only rivals, has devoted, has lavished 500 pages of hard-core, hardback, exegetical analysis to the words which propel Bob Dylan's songs.
		Now Ricks is 70 and Dylan in his early sixties and Ricks has decided to throw neither flowers nor tomatoes at Dylan from the stalls but a socking, concussing magnum opus.
		Ricks taking his trowel, his toolkit to Dylan is a literary event as consequent as if Alfred Brendel, say, brought out a new edition of Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts with a long comparison of Dylan to Schubert appended.
	www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_qa3724/is_200310/ai_n9333172 (906 words)

	EducationGuardian.co.uk \| Higher \| Christopher Ricks: Someone's gotta hold of his art (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		If Christopher Ricks is better known for his admiration of Bob Dylan than for his own work, it doesn't seem to bother him.
		Combative in print, in person Ricks is the most courteous of men, appalled by the way certain of his leftwing academic colleagues treat staff; he told an American interviewer the worst thing about living in the US was "the discourtesy and the lethal hostility on the roads".
		Ricks is also promising to provide a poet, an case anyone feels a mere critic is not enough.
	education.guardian.co.uk /higher/profile/story/0,11109,1259480,00.html (1289 words)

	Commentary Magazine - T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, by Christopher Ricks' (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Its obvious mission is to relieve T.S. Eliot's reputation of the charge of anti-Semitism, yet the intellectual strategy it adopts as a means of accomplishing this unachievable--and, in fact, unachieved--mission is one that so distends the concept of "prejudice" as to render it supererogatory.
		...Ricks thus straightaway introduces the issue of prejudice against women, but not, as we might suppose he would, given the evidence, in order to establish Eliot's culpability on a roster of biased beliefs that would take us well beyond the subject of antiSemitism...
		...Ricks has an impressive gift for the kind of microanalysis of words that he appropriates from the criticism of William Empson, and itBOOKS IN REVIEW/65 allows him to score many points in his disputes with other critics who are sometimes less attentive to the exact meaning of words than he is...
	www.commentarymagazine.com /Summaries/V89I3P65-1.htm (2460 words)

	The New York Times > Books > Dylan, Master Poet? Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
		Ricks has himself written or edited — books about Keats, Milton, Beckett and T. Eliot; editions of Tennyson, Housman and Eliot's early poems; anthologies of Victorian verse and of English poetry from the anonymous author of "Sumer is icumen in" to Seamus Heaney.
		Ricks, who is 70 and was born in Britain and educated at Oxford, is a professor's professor, a don's don.
		Ricks devotes four pages (and four footnotes) to the lyrics of "All the Tired Horses," a song that is only two lines long — or maybe three, if you count the long "Hmmmm" at the end.
	www.nytimes.com /2004/06/09/books/09DYLA.html?ex=1402113600&en=b3f5dd187be3f6b1&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND (805 words)

	Amazon.de: The Oxford Book of English Verse: English Books: Christopher Ricks (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Ricks states categorically that his "does not seek to be a book of Anglophone verse, of verse in the English language whatever its provenance." This leads to some anomalies.
		Ricks admits that "most of us are not good at appreciating the poetry of those appreciably younger than we are." That's a shame, because it denies The Oxford Book of English Verse a role in disseminating the work of the younger generation (and we're talking under 60 here) from a diversity of backgrounds.
		Rick's new Book of English Verse has been criticized for excluding too much modern verse, however I find that the poetry he has selected provides a fine overview of English Poetry over the course of the last millenium.
	www.amazon.de /Oxford-Book-English-Verse/dp/0192141821 (1659 words)

	Eugene Weekly : Books : 12.29.05
		Ricks offers some 40 of Dylan's works from different periods of his songwriting career to support Dylan's connection to sin.
		I love the way Ricks recognizes and lauds the magic in words, how he solves the puzzles of rhyme and repetition, how he lays bare Dylan's strategy in each song he looks at in depth.
		Ricks says he is not a believer himself, but maybe that helps him write so that even non-believers can understand what Dylan is saying in these songs.
	www.eugeneweekly.com /2005/12/29/books.html (652 words)

	Ricks
		Ricks, the Oxford professor of poetry, and a professor at Boston University, lumps the folk genius from Tin Pan Alley with Britain’s finest wordsmiths.
		Last time Ricks was at the school, he spoke on Dylan, the human genome project, the place of fact in fiction, Beckett and dying, Othello and lying, and plagiarism.
		Ricks will speak as part of NMH’s “State of the World” series on February 12 at 6:45 pm in the Rhodes Room of Beveridge Hall on the Mount Hermon campus in Gill.
	www.nmhschool.org /news/releases05-06/Ricks.php (218 words)

	Pedantry Can Be Funny \| Music \| The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper
		The dust jacket of Christopher Ricks' new extrapolation on poetry (yes, poetry), Dylan's Vision of Sin, is tagged with a quote by the New Yorker's Alex Ross repeating Bob Dylan's opinion that most rock critics are 40-year-olds talking to 10-year-olds.
		Ricks has a great deal to say about Dylan as poet, and he does it with a good-natured pedantry that often makes the reader, as well as Ricks himself, laugh.
		Ricks has chosen to focus his book on the seven deadly sins, with chapters dedicated to Dylan's lyrical obsession with each, and he revels in infinite attention to detail (complete with observations of similarities to or inspiration by the works of lauded poets of the past).
	www.thestranger.com /seattle/Content?oid=18605 (558 words)

	Threepenny: Furbank, On Christopher Ricks
		By contrast, almost the first thing one notices about Ricks as a critic, though he often quotes those words of Eliot's, is that he has a “manner,” a set of idiosyncratic ploys—a bundle of tricks, if you like to call it so—very far removed from the “plain” style.
		Ricks, here and elsewhere, is combating Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence,” according to which the relationship of new poets to old is a bitter Oedipean conflict.
		That Ricks has valuable insights into the human psyche and the “moral life” is proved by his very attractive Keats and Embarrassment, a work of literary criticism of a quite original kind.
	www.threepennyreview.com /samples/furbank_sp03.html (2506 words)

	News: Professor of Poetry
		Christopher Ricks has been named as the next Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.
		The result was announced at a meeting of Convocation, before the result was publicly announced by the Senior Proctor, Dr John Wheater, and the Junior Proctor, Revd Dr Judith Maltby.
		Christopher Ricks is Professor of Humanities at Boston University.
	www.admin.ox.ac.uk /po/040515.shtml (366 words)

	Christopher Ricks (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Ricks goes on to illustrate this with the subtle, somewhat devilish, complication of the Jacob's Ladder vision (Paradise Lost iii 510-25).
		Ricks' latest work "Dylan's Visions of Sin" on the pop singer Bob Dylan has exposed him (Ricks) to some negative reactions in the UK, And it is difficult to see why he sees so much in Dylan's work.
		Nevertheless, Ricks, apart from combining an extraordinarily intelligence with a professional knowledge of literature perhaps unsurpassed in the 20th century, is also one of the very few literary critics who can be trusted.
	www.justwords.demon.co.uk /christopher_ricks.htm (740 words)

	Dylan's Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks \| PopMatters Book Review
		Christopher Ricks is an intellectual authority, a literary critic, a scholar, an academic.
		Ricks' aligning of the song with Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" makes Ricks look something like a conspiracy theorist as he diddles through line-by-line parallels in word choice, and stanza-by-stanza content analysis.
		The ancillary material (in both Ricks and Eliot) is perfectly interesting and enlightening, but it mustn't get in the way of the voice, of the images, of the mind.
	www.popmatters.com /books/reviews/d/dylans-vision-of-sin.shtml (1078 words)

	Guardian Unlimited Books \| By genre \| Observer review: Dylan's Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Interestingly, Christopher Ricks, formerly professor of English at Cambridge, now professor of humanities at Boston, is conspicuous by his absence from that last volume.
		Ricks quotes, for example, an uncharacteristically forthcoming Dylan on the writing of 'Positively 4th Street', which the singer says 'is extremely one-dimensional...
		From this fragment of illumination, Ricks then constructs a thicket of academic obfuscation: 'Two-dimensional, not-one dimensional, this 4th Street, and although one-sided, it is two-edged, a two-handed engine that stands ready to smite more than once and smite some more...
	books.guardian.co.uk /reviews/artsandentertainment/0,6121,1041453,00.html (1108 words)

	Phillips Exeter Academy \| "The Songs of Bob Dylan" by Oxford Professor of Poetry Ricks (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Exeter, NH (February 24, 2006)â” Eminent literary scholar and editor Christopher Ricks will give a talk on the songs of Bob Dylan on Wednesday, March 1, at 7:00 p.m.
		The author of numerous studies and definitive editions of Milton, Keats, Tennyson, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Ricks has steered into new territory for his latest book, Dylanâs Vision of Sin, focusing on the songs of Bob Dylan: Specifically, Ricks resituates the American songwriter in the line of English poets.
		Christopher Ricks is currently Professor of Poetry at Oxfordâ”a post held by both Matthew Arnold and W. Auden.
	www.exeter.edu /news_and_events/news_events_998.aspx (285 words)

	Power Line: Visions of sin
		In any event, the fun is to be had in the Ideas piece on the new book by literary critic Christopher Ricks on Bob Dylan: "The Dylanist." Ricks is a serious scholar of Milton who is also learned in modernist poetry.
		The piece opens with an anecdote deriving from his tenure at Cambridge University (he's now at Boston University): "Years ago, when Christopher Ricks was teaching at Cambridge University, he discovered that some of his students were playing a game called Ricks Bingo during his classes.
		Here's Ricks on "Hattie Carroll": "In 'The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,' Dylan earns Ricks's praise for the delicacy with which he handles the combustible subjects of racial and social iniquity.
	powerlineblog.com /archives/004884.php (652 words)

	Reviews
		Ricks (and ergo the Editorial Institute of Boston University) is the recent recipient of their Distinguished Achievement Award with its stipend of one and a half million dollars.
		Ricks and Eliot share that passion for language, evident also in The State of Language (1980), co-edited by Ricks with Leonard Michaels.
		Ricks summed up the situation of African-Americans in his scathing 1964 critique of Sartre’s Saint Genet, in reaction to Sartre’s comments on Negroes’ hatred of America “the Negro, if he loves America, does so in spite of its contempt for him, and he wants to change America” [p.
	www.cercles.com /review/r15/ricks.htm (1299 words)

	Amazon.com: Dylan's Visions of Sin: Books: Christopher Ricks (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		You'll be a little jealous, of course, wishing you had the literary storehouse of information and insight that Christopher Ricks has at his disposal from which to gather literary parallels, borrowings, and coincidences.
		In this spirit, Ricks examines songs from every stage of Dylan's career, always assuming the songwriter, consciously or by instinct, knew what he was doing.
		Ricks has a habit of free-associating on particular snippets from the songs, in pyrotechnic wordplay aimed at divining what Dylan's own associations may have or must have been.
	www.amazon.com /Dylans-Visions-Sin-Christopher-Ricks/dp/0060599235 (2137 words)

	Shakespeare in the Alley - Book Reviews
		Ricks selects "You Gotta Serve Somebody" but overlooks the wonderful line in "Gates of Eden" about paupers exchanging possessions, "each one wishing for what the other has got." Even more of a challenge is greed: Ricks finds no songs on this sin, exclaiming, "Oh, my divine scheme...
		Ricks' unique approach delights in its eccentricity and produces fascinating results for the dedicated reader.
		While an Oxford-educated Brit, Ricks surprises with the breadth of his sources, quoting The Onion and Rolling Stone along with his favorite sources, the King James Bible and the Oxford English Dictionary.
	www.western.edu /faculty/bking/ssna/review2.html (687 words)

	Christopher Ricks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Christopher Ricks (born 1933) is a British literary critic and scholar.
		In 1975 Ricks moves to the University of Cambridge (where he was King Edward VII Professor) before moving to BU in 1986.
		He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry, for his enthusiasm for Bob Dylan, and for his opposition to literary theory.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Christopher_Ricks (352 words)

	Amazon.ca: Becketts Dying Words: Books: Christopher Ricks (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Ricks shows over and over again that while Beckett is a marvellous writer in French, in English he is one of the handful of the irreplaceable.' Lucy Becket, The Tablet
		Ricks and Beckett make a wonderful double act as graveyard comedians; this is a funereal feast of a book.' Sunday Times
		'Ricks gives Beckett's passionate hang-dog mind and his morbid pleasure in the contrariness of words their full due in this immensely enjoyable study.' Robin Blake, Independent on Sunday
	www.amazon.ca /Becketts-Dying-Words-Christopher-Ricks/dp/0192824074 (535 words)

	Some People Really Like Dylan @ Blogcritics.org (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Like Christopher Ricks, newly elected professor of poetry at Oxford, and the Warren Professor of Humanities at Boston University, who has a new book out on the subject that many might consider...
		Ricks devotes four pages (and four footnotes) to the lyrics of "All the Tired Horses," a song that is only two lines long - or maybe three, if you count the long "Hmmmm" at the end.
		Ricks, was Dylan Thomas, not the former Bob Zimmerman.
	blogcritics.org /archives/2004/06/09/145735.php (3107 words)

	Amazon.fr : Dylan's Visions of Sin: Livres en anglais: Christopher Ricks (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Ricks, a professor of humanities at Boston University, allows his own musings about Bob Dylan to go "blowin' in the wind" in this love letter to the enigmatic bard.
		Focusing on the centrality of the seven deadly sins (pride, anger, lust, envy, sloth, greed, covetousness), the four virtues (justice, temperance, fortitude, prudence) and the three graces (faith, hope, love) in Dylan's writings, Ricks confirms Dylan's poetic genius and elevates the poet of the north country to canonical status alongside Tennyson, Shakespeare and Milton.
		Through a series of closely engaged readings of selected songs, Ricks demonstrates how each reflects a concern with sin, virtue or grace.
	www.amazon.fr /Dylans-Visions-Sin-Christopher-Ricks/dp/067080133X (582 words)

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