#christopher ricks

[clemensclemens]

La muerte es, entre otras cosas, la misericordia del tiempo.

– Christopher Ricks.

[anaxerneas]

From Christopher Ricks' introduction to Alfred Lord Tennyson, Selected Poems

[theblackestofsuns]

Essays In Appreciation (1996)

Christopher Ricks

Oxford University Press

[theblackestofsuns]

Beckett's Dying Words (1993)

Christopher Ricks

Oxford University Press

[rogueish]

Colin Burrow · Ti tum ti tum ti tum: Chic Sport Shirker · LRB 7 October 2021

If one suspects, at times, that one’s eye is being led on a dance, it is at least always a merry one, and Christopher...

The line between seeing things (in the sense of observing things which are there) and seeing things (in the sense of imagining things which are not there) is a finer one in literary criticism than it is in life in general. But the boundary between the two matters in several ways. Only a really good critic can take you up to that boundary and make you wonder which side you’re on. Bad critics tell you what you already knew, or else stride obliviously over the boundary between the noticed and the imaginary into their own fantasy realms of implausible readings. Good critics make you see things. They do it by redescribing texts, or paintings, or music, or posters, or advertisements, or cultures, so that something which was not fully visible before becomes legible. That act of making visible could be a matter of saying ‘look how the brushwork here creates a glowing shadow,’ or even ‘look at this correlation between poverty and the spread of disease,’ or it could be ‘look at all those -ibles and think about what they tell us.’ Criticism is an especially contentious discipline because the criteria for distinguishing the seen from the invented are themselves contentious. The plausibility of a particular piece of criticism depends in part on the persuasiveness of the critic and the willingness of an audience to see things a particular way, with facts and data also playing their part, but not a much more determining part than the judgment of the audience. That means an ultra-plausible critic like Ricks can create a kind of supernova of brightness which eclipses the texts he’s analysing and makes it hard to see the boundary between what is him and what is them.

[seanhtaylor]

There is no great religious poetry that does not raise -- as crucial to its enterprise -- the question of whether it is open to the charge of blasphemy, even as there is no great erotic art that does not raise the question of whether it is open to the charge of pornography. -- Christopher Ricks, Bob Dylan's Vision of Sin

[un-gyvepress]

John Dryden, Burleigh House

Those who have homes, when home they do repair,

    To a last lodging call their wandering friends:

Their short uneasy sleeps are broke with care,

    To look how near their own destruction tends.

Those who have none, sit round where once it was,

    And with full eyes each wonted room require;

Haunting the yet warm ashes of the place,

    As murder’d men walk where they did expire.

— John Dryden, from “Annus Mirabilis”

“Poor Dryden! what with his wife—consort one can not call her, and helpmeet she was not—and with a tribe of tobacconist brothers on one hand, and proud Howards on the other; and a host of titled associates, and his bread to dig with his pen, one pities him from one's heart. Well might he, when his wife once said it would be much better for her to be a book than a woman, for then she should have more of his company, reply, ‘I wish you were, my dear, an almanac, and then I could change you once a year.’ It is not well to look much into such a home, except for a warning.”

— William Howitt

The collected work Views of the Haunts and Homes of the British Poets, Oct. 19 1850., found by Christopher Ricks in the little bookshop in Nailsworth just a few miles from his home in Gloucestershire, contains the original mixed media/watercolour illustrations for the Howitt Haunts and Homes, presumably made by either one or both of the Measom brothers, George Samuel and William, (The London edition credits “The Illustrations by W. and G. Measom”) and bound for preservation in 1850, after the publication of the two Howitt volumes.

Published as a limited edition of 100 Views of the Haunts and Homes of the British Poets is available in the Un-Gyve bookstore.

[un-gyvepress]

Stella’s Cottage

No bloom of youth can ever blind

The cracks and wrinkles of your mind:

All men of sense will pass your door,

And crowd to Stella’s at four-score.

— Jonathan Swift, from “Stella’s Birth-day”

“The next victim of this wretched man was Esther Johnson, the Stella of this strange history. This young lady was the daughter of the steward of Sir William Temple at Moorpark; she was fatherless when Swift commenced his designs upon her; her father died soon after her birth, and her mother and sister resided in the house at Moorpark, and were treated with particular regard and esteem by the family. Miss Esther Johnson, who was much younger than Swift, was beautiful, lively, and amiable. Swift devoted himself to her as her teacher, and under advantage of his daily office and position, engaged her young affections most absolutely. So completely was it understood by her that they were to be married when Swift’s income warranted it, that on the death of Temple, and Swift’s preferment to the living of Laracor in Ireland, she was induced by him to come over and fix her residence in Trim near him, under the protection of a lady of middle age, Mrs. Dingley.”

— William Howitt

William Howitt is unsparing in his view of Swift (“in the category of heartless villains”) given in his Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets but devotes a section to “STELLA’S HOUSE” in his treatment of the poet which allows some of the idyll of the Irish thatched roof cottage:

Swift took much pleasure in his garden at Laracor; converted a rivulet that ran through it into a regular canal, and planted on its banks avenues of willows. As soon as he was settled, Stella, and her companion, Mrs. Dingley, came over and settled down too. They had a house near the gate of Knightsbrook, the old residence of the Percivals, almost half a mile from Swift’s house, where they lived when Swift was at Laracor, or were the guests of the hospitable vicar of Trim, Dr. Raymond. Whenever Swift left Laracor for a time, as on his annual journeys to England, the ladies then took possession of the vicarage of Laracor, and remained there during his absence. The site of Stella’s house is marked on the Ordnance Survey of the county of Meath.

The collected work Views of the Haunts and Homes of the British Poets, Oct. 19 1850., found by Christopher Ricks in the little bookshop in Nailsworth just a few miles from his home in Gloucestershire, contains the original mixed media/watercolour illustrations for the Howitt Haunts and Homes, presumably made by either one or both of the Measom brothers, George Samuel and William, (The London edition credits “The Illustrations by W. and G. Measom”) and bound for preservation in 1850, after the publication of the two Howitt volumes.

Published as a limited edition of 100 Views of the Haunts and Homes of the British Poets is available in the Un-Gyve bookstore.