The artful noticer
Christopher Ricks is the most gifted and ingenious—sometimes over-ingenious— literary critic of his generation, argues John Mullan
Christopher Ricks has long had the reputation of being the most gi ed academic literary critic writing in English. His gi 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 o en 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.
Ricks’s intense attention works best in short bursts. His first book of criticism, Milton’s Grand Style, published way back in 1963, is very short and utterly compelling. I was bowled over by it when studying Paradise Lost at university. It took the complaining or dismissive comments by leading critics about passages of Paradise Lost and showed how wrong they were. This was not for the sake of besting those critics, but to demonstrate how subtle and expressive Milton’s verse truly was. Ricks’s close readings were so precise and intelligent that they went beyond mere opinion: he was showing you exactly what the poet was up to.
Ricks banished the notion that the blank verse in Milton’s great poem was ponderous or merely incantatory—“grand,” yes, but not grandiose. His account is recalled in Along Heroic Lines, when he explains how he gets the title and unifying principle (though “any claim to coherence has to be a mild one”) for this new volume. The five-stress line that we know best from Milton and Shakespeare should not be called, as it is taught in schools, the “iambic pentameter,” a term that tries to turn English into Latin or Greek. Instead, he prefers the phrase “the English heroic line” to describe the five-stress line, judged suitable for epic—or “heroic”—poetry not only by Milton, but also by great translators of classical epics such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope. This deviates far more o en than it conforms to the iambic norm—an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable—as (Ricks shows) in the opening lines of Paradise Lost.
“Ricks’s close readings go beyond mere opinion: he is showing you exactly what the poet was up to”
While most of the essays here are based on pieces first published a decade or more ago, they have been revised and “augmented,” o en substantially. One augmentation has involved Ricks going through the passages of prose he quotes, spotting “heroic lines.” He has set these apart on the page, below the quoted passages, marked off by a pair of tildes: ~. He finds such a line in a letter from TS Eliot to his brother, Henry, about his wife Vivien’s mental illness: “I must not leave her, even for a night.” Ricks says this is “a heroic line, tragic in its cadence” (but maybe it’s as much self-dramatising as tragic?). He finds such lines everywhere: in letters by Dr Johnson or Jane Carlyle; in passages from a novel by George Meredith; from a speech by Henry James, a preface by Henry James, a short story by Henry James. The implication seems to be that this is the cadence and the span of expression that writers in English
adopt when their feelings are intense or when eloquence is needed. Yet the mere quotation of such lines, as if that were enough to prove something, becomes distracting, even irritating.
For you would like Ricks to say more about his detections of verse-in-prose. Is it because Dickens (weaned on his father’s histrionic orations) was obsessed with Shakespeare that the heroic lines come thick and fast in his novels? In Dombey and Son, in a passage describing Mr Dombey setting out in his son’s funeral cortège, Ricks discovers as many heroic lines as there are sentences. In the concluding paragraphs of Great Expectations, he finds a further flurry. Elsewhere, a piece on Norman Mailer’s prose admires it most for its rhythms (where some might hear a striving for rhythm). A passage from The Executioner’s Song (“Mailer’s masterpiece”) is found to be more or less written in blank verse. As an ingenious party piece, Ricks manages to make three plausible pseudo-sonnets out of extracted lines— rhyming as well as scanning—from Mailer’s oeuvre.
Presaging the gleaning of verse from lines of prose, Ricks’s book opens with a characteristic performance—literally so, as it is based on his 2004 inaugural lecture as professor of poetry at Oxford.
“The Best Words in the Best Order” takes its title from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s dictum about the superiority of poetry to prose (the latter being merely “words in their best order”). Conscious, perhaps, that registering the effects of poetry has always been his thing, Ricks debunks the idea that poetry is inherently superior to prose. He finds the prejudice alive in all sorts of critics and, to put them right, quotes passages of brilliant prose from Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. Allusive and playful, Ricks corrects easy critical assumptions in ways that would entertain any literature lover.
So too would another essay re-composed from a lecture, “TS Eliot and ‘Wrong’d Othello.”’ Here he analyses Eliot’s notorious claim that, in his sonorous final monologue, Shakespeare’s Othello is “cheering himself up” (the italics are Eliot’s). Ricks shows you what perhaps you had heard but did not really see before—how Eliot’s criticism takes on the phrasing and diction of what he criticises. Far from distancing himself from Othello, Eliot is deeply involved in his words and thoughts. Suddenly you see that lines in The Waste Land that you have read a hundred times echo this marital tragedy. Eliot meets Shakespeare in a net of
quotations and allusions, which Ricks, fresh from editing Eliot’s poems, minutely elaborates.
Ricks has always believed in copious quotations; here they are so substantial that the book sometimes feels like an anthology. When Ricks is telling us that Shakespeare liked to use the phrase “cheer up” when his characters were facing death, a footnote fills the page with examples. In an essay on novelists reflecting critically on other novels, he gives the bulk of a letter from Charlotte Brontë to her publisher, deprecating the superficiality of Jane Austen’s Emma. He follows it with just one sentence of his own, asserting merely that Brontë’s judgment “must not be waived.”
He o en lets the quotation explain itself rather than showing us his critical thinking. Half a page of John Ruskin deploring, with grim amusement, the number of deaths in Bleak House, is glossed with the observation that “Ruskin has assuredly seized upon something.” Pithy paragraphs of DH Lawrence on Nathaniel Hawthorne come without any comment at all. Lengthy entries from James’s notebooks are le to tell us what they tell us. Several pages analysing one of James’s short stories, “The Modern Warning,” have more of James than of Ricks. You can add your own insights.
Ricks’s own critical prose is jazzed up with unattributed half-quotations. “By the thumbing of my nose”; “Alas, poor critics”; “thanks to whirligig revenges.” Mostly this is enjoyable (I have spotted the quote!); occasionally it imposes literariness. When Mailer is describing the untormented slumber of tormented characters, Ricks comments, “the sleep of scorpions might, with luck and pluck, yield to the sleep that knits up, not ravels.” Ricks has Macbeth in his head, but did Mailer?
Equally, Ricks likes to play with idioms and clichés: “this has its work cut out, or rather cuts out the need for any work”; “Dryden goes, not out of his way, but truly by means of his way”; “the detail that can be seen but not heard.” Analysing the faux diffidence of Eliot’s lecture to the Shakespeare Association in 1927, he observes, “flattery… is laid on with a vengeance.” Ricks relishes the “demotic turn” of Eliot’s critical statements and displays the liking in his own sentences. He likes to tangle a simple idiom in a complicated thought.
On Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, agreeing to marry a cold-hearted man who does not love her, he remarks, “it is not so much a refusal in James to explain Isabel’s acceding to Osmond’s proposal, as a refusal by James to be held to be in the explaining business.” Whatever “business” James was in, the oddity of the idiom tells you it was (rightly) not “the explaining business.”
Such wordplay is essential to his criticism, which finds how the best writers unloose the suggestive powers of words. Though it does not appear in his index, his most quoted book is the Oxford English Dictionary, his guide to those powers. One essay is about a single word: “Congratulations” explores the use of “self-congratulation” by a dizzy-making sequence of writers, from Milton to Christina Rossetti, via Beckett, Joseph Addison and William Wordsworth, among others. Over and over again, he makes a point with an inventive quibble or a clash of similar words: James’s irony allows “neither simple commendation nor simple condemnation”; lines of The Prelude bespeak “the deep Wordsworthian alignment of composure, including self-composure, and composition”; a Mailer character indulges “a vindictive pleasure, laced with a self-deceiving vindication.” Ricks likes to stretch words into new forms. Carlyle’s reference in a letter to his wife Jane’s “pretty little brag” is called “affectionate diminutivery.” The Russian General Suwarrow in Byron’s Don Juan displays “not coldness precisely, but coolth, yes.”
Lexical super-sensitivity sometimes seems to have become a good in itself, but an uncommitted reader might have doubts about the finer details. An essay on the poet Geoffrey Hill, for instance, ruminating at length on the significance of words ending with the suffix -ble in Hill’s writing, is for the already-paid-up only. A piece on anagrams in poetry feels like a limit case of Ricks’s ingenuity. Sometimes you go along with him: the point of a line from Donne in the original spelling—“And holds me in the Sun-beames of her haire”—is that me is held in beames. Ah, yes! But sometimes you don’t: “Am I imagining things?” Ricks asks, when finding a particularly remote “possibility of the anagrammatic” in a Shakespeare sonnet. Yes, I found myself answering. Yet Ricksian minute analysis at least credits the writers with the cleverness he is trying to match. An occupational vice of academic criticism is to show itself cleverer than the writers discussed. In contrast, Ricks’s over-ingenuity tries to serve the text, not himself.
John Mullan is a professor of English at UCL. His latest book is “The Artful Dickens” (Bloomsbury)
“Ricks corrects easy critical assumptions in ways that would entertain any literature lover”