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“... forms of criticism. Among the most deep and distinguished of this last kind of interpreter is Christopher Ricks, whose previous books include Milton’s Grand Style, Keats and Embarrassment, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice and Beckett’s Dying Words. Dylan’s Visions of Sin is the culmination of at least three decades’ critical engagement with the songs ...”

“... in the publication, nearly a century on, of Faber’s two all-comprehending new tomes, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. The editors promise to ‘elucidate the difficulties’ of Eliot’s work by tracing every possible verbal overlap between the words used in his poems and the words used by other writers, both famous and obscure, in texts ...”

“... In March of the following year, in the London Review of Books, the book was examined at length by Christopher Ricks, whose piece was reprinted – at Mailer’s suggestion, or so I was told at the time – in the form of an advertisement in the New York Review of Books. The piece was laudatory – excited, even exalted: it argued for special qualities of ...”

“... the way he wrote was of interest, that variant readings of his poems were precious. Now we have Ricks’s three volumes of the poems, expanding the original one-volume edition of 1969, and presenting Tennyson, like the lavish set-piece of a Victorian banquet, in a sauce of his own innards (variants from notebooks, from letters, from trial editions, from ...”

“... Christopher Ricks’s new book makes available many of his distinguished lectures given in the Eighties and Nineties. The essays retain a sense of occasion, and of a star performance on Ricks’s part, while the book has been designed with the aggressive sobriety that signals a class act ...”

“... of language. Many of the words are quoted from Beckett’s fiction, but in several passages Ricks nearly forgets Beckett, and fixes his attention on Philip Larkin, Hardy, Swift, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Christina Rossetti or another. I can’t believe that he chose to deliver these Clarendon Lectures as a hodge-podge. It is more probable that he ...”

“... inward smile? Such a speculation is one of the numerous minor pleasures to be had when reading Ricks’s notes to this fine edition of the poems, and most of the prose. Ricks, too, is a rigorous scholar, who can be almost as acerbic as Housman himself, but he notes the mistake and the correction without comment. That ...”

“... see but not experience: living is necessarily independent of it. In his study of Samuel Beckett, Christopher Ricks says that we desire both oblivion and eternity; but except in the insidiously artificial world of writers like Beckett, who make death a cliché within the life of language, neither of these wishes makes much sense. Dr Johnson would have ...”

“... when the Penguin and Oxford anthologies of English verse edited respectively by Paul Keegan and Christopher Ricks appeared. Like their predecessors, they exclude most of the Middle Ages; feature no work (even in translation) from Latin, Old English or French; and co-opt Irish, Scottish, Welsh and American verse as ‘English’. Since the appearance of ...”

“... himself and the stupefied awe his critics feel for him. One of Hill’s most notable champions is Christopher Ricks and we may approach this volume by applying the critical principles which Ricks enunciated in a recent consideration of Empson’s work. Ricks praised his critical ...”

“... writer and scholar by Professor R.B. Martin. Of the lectures the most immediately striking is by Christopher Ricks, who among other endowments appears to have tucked away in his head something like a complete concordance to English poetry. In more than one previous publication he has investigated Tennyson’s sufficiently well-known habit of borrowing ...”

“... Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, reviewed in the LRB (Vol. 3, No 21) by Christopher Ricks; and Thomas McFarland’s marvellously over-the-top Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, which also appeared in 1981. (One might commend, en passant, the Princeton University Press as a place where inventive, wordy studies in Romantic ideas ...”

“... some point in saying things about Dylan, one is up against the exhausting ingenuity of (Professor) Christopher Ricks. But it has to be said, too, that even if Ricks is making an ideological raid, as it were, on ‘low culture’, to carry off our man into the Cambridge University English Tripos, his attention to the ...”

“... the millennial gift books already piling up on remainder tables, 1999 marked the appearance of Christopher Ricks’s successor to Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse, published a hundred years ago, revised in 1939, and followed in 1972 by Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book; of the Longman Anthology of British Literature, a brashly ...”

“... plenty of items relating to the poet’s promiscuous sex life: at the same time, he observes what Christopher Ricks has identified as an honourable Victorian reticence as to the inner life and motives of his subject. In other words, his way with facts is such that reticence and candour meet, and that, apart from the details of publication and ...”