Bob Dylan's ways with words are a wonder, matched as they are with his music and verified by those voices of his. In response to the whole range of Dylan early and late (his songs of social conscience, of earthly love, of divine love, and of contemplation), this critical appreciation listens to Dylan's attentive genius, alive in the very words and their rewards.

"Fools they made a mock of sin." Dylan's is an art in which sins are laid bare (and resisted), virtues are valued (and manifested), and the graces brought home. The seven deadly sins, the four cardinal virtues (harder to remember?), and the three heavenly graces: these make up everybody's world -- but Dylan's in particular. Or rather, his worlds, since human dealings of every kind are his for the artistic seizing. Pride is anatomized in "Like a Rolling Stone," Envy in "Positively 4th Street," Anger in "Only a Pawn in Their Game" ... But, hearteningly, Justice reclaims "Hattie Carroll," Fortitude "Blowin' in the Wind," Faith "Precious Angel," Hope "Forever Young," and Charity "Watered-Down Love."

In The "New Yorker, Alex Ross wrote that "Ricks's writing on Dylan is the best there is. Unlike most rock critics -- 'forty-year-olds talking to ten-year-olds, ' Dylan has called them -- he writes for adults." In the "Times (London), Bryan Appleyard maintained that "Ricks, one of the most distinguished literary critics of our time, is almost the only writer to have applied serious literary intelligence to Dylan ..."

Dylan's countless listeners (and even the artist himself, who knows?) may agree with W.H. Auden that Ricks "is exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding."

Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, Poetry Foundation, Chicago Richard J. Finneran Award, Society for Textual Scholarship Best Scholarly Edition Award, Modernist Studies Association The Poems of T. S. Eliot is the authoritative edition of one of our greatest poets, scrupulously edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. It provides, for the first time, a fully scrutinized text of Eliot's poems, carefully restoring accidental omissions and removing textual errors that have crept in over the full century in which Eliot has been so frequently printed and reprinted. The edition also presents many poems from Eliot's youth which were published only decades later, as well as others that saw only private circulation in his lifetime, of which dozens are collected for the first time. To accompany Eliot's poems, Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have provided a commentary that illuminates the creative activity that came to constitute each poem, calling upon drafts, correspondence and other original materials to provide a vivid account of the poet's working processes, his reading, his influences and his revisions. The first volume respects Eliot's decisions by opening with his Collected Poems 1909-1962 in the form in which he issued it, shortly before his death fifty years ago. There follow in this first volume the uncollected poems from his youth that he had chosen to publish, along with such other poems as could be considered suitable for publication. The second volume opens with the two books of poems of other kinds that he issued, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and his translation of Perse's Anabase, moving then to verses privately circulated as informal or improper or clubmanlike. Each of these sections is accompanied by its respective commentary, and then, pertaining to the entire edition, there is a comprehensive textual history recording variants both manuscript and published. The Poems of T. S. Eliot is a work of enlightening scholarship that will delight and inform all those who read Eliot for pleasure, as well as all those who read with pleasure and for study. Here are a new accuracy and an unparalleled insight into the marvels and landmarks from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land through to Four Quartets.

This critical edition establishes a new text of the Collected Poems 1909-1962, rectifying accidental omissions and errors. As well as the masterpieces, it contains the poems of Eliot's youth which were rediscovered only decades later, others that circulated privately during his lifetime, and love poems from his final years, written for his wife Valerie Eliot. Calling upon Eliot's critical writings, as well as his drafts, letters and other original materials, Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have provided a commentary which illuminates the imaginative life of each poem.

A selection of new and revised essays from eminent scholar and critic Professor Christopher Ricks. Christopher Ricks brings together new as well as substantially augmented critical essays across a wide range. Several derive from his term as the Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, when his inaugural lecture engaged with the illuminatingly puzzled relations between poetry and prose. Comparison and analysis (the tools of the critic, as T.S. Eliot insisted) are enlivened by imaginative pairings: of Samuel Johnson with Samuel Beckett, of Norman Mailer with Dickens, of Shakespeare with George Herbert, or of secret-police surveillance in Ben Jonson's Rome with that of Carmen Bugan's Romania. Along Heroic Lines devotes itself to the heroic and to 'heroics' (Othello cross-examined by T.S. Eliot; Byron and role-playing; Ion Bugan, political protest and arrest). This knot is in tension with the English heroic line (Dryden's heroic triplets, Henry James's cadences, Geoffrey Hill's concluding book of prose-poems and how they choose to conclude). All alert to the balance and sustenance of alternate tones that prose and poetry can achieve in harmony.

This is the only fully annotated and comprehensive selection of Tennyson's poetry. Acknowledged as a major achievement of editorial scholarship, it has established itself as the standard edition of Tennyson. The collection contains in full all four of Tennyson's long poems: The Princess, In Memoriam, Maud, and Idylls of the King. Other key works are included from Mariana, The Lady of Shallott, Morte d'Arthur, Ulysses, and Tithonus through Tennyson's middle life and the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, to his last years and Crossing the Bar.

Here in one volume are the texts of two of the greatest--and most controversial--epic poems in English literature, each a profound exploration of the moral problems of God's justice. Includes notes by Ricks and a new Afterword by Weldon. Revised reissue.

This biographical and critical study of Tennyson aims to show what went into the making of the man, exploring the power, subtlety and variety of his poems, along with the artistic principles and preoccupations which shaped his life's work.

Presents a fully annotated and comprehensive selection of Tennyson's poetry. This collection contains in full all four of Tennyson's long poems: 'The Princess', 'In Memoriam', 'Maud', and 'Idylls of the King'. Other key works are included from 'Mariana', 'The Lady of Shallott', 'Morte d'Arthur', 'Ulysses', 'Tithonus', and more.This edition retains all the headnotes and footnotes from the complete edition, which shed valuable light on context and composition and which illuminate the wealth of allusion, classical and other, that Tennyson brought to bear within his poetry. Now in a corrected edition, Tennyson: A Selected Edition will remain the standard edition for many years to come.

This is a study of the poetry of T.S. Eliot. The author sets out to discover just how his poetry, charged with coldness, antisemitism, misogyny, elitism and prissiness invites or incites prejudice.

As Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign, Alfred Lord Tennyson's spellbinding poetry epitomized the Victorian age, and Selected Poems is edited with an introduction and notes by Christopher Ricks. 'Into the jaw of Death Into the mouth of Hell Rode the six hundred' The works in this volume trace nearly sixty years in the literary career of one of the nineteenth century's greatest poets, and show the wide variety of poetic forms he mastered. This selection gives some of Tennyson's most famous works in full, including Maud, depicting a tragic love affair, and In Memoriam, a profound tribute to his dearest friend. Excerpts from Idylls of the King show a lifelong passion for Arthurian legend, also seen in the dream-like The Lady of Shalot and in Morte d'Arthur. Other works respond to contemporary events, such as Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, written in Tennyson's official role as Poet Laureate, or the patriotic Charge of the Light Brigade, while Locksley Hall provides a Utopian vision of the future, and the late poem Crossing the Bar is a haunting meditation on his own mortality. In his introduction, Christopher Ricks discusses aspects of Tennyson's life and works, his revisions of his poems, and his friendship with Arthur Hallam. This edition also includes a chronology, further reading and notes. Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was born at Somersby, Lincolnshire, the sixth of eleven children. His first important book, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, was published in 1830, and was not a critical success, but his two volumes of Poems, 1842, which contain some of his finest work, established him as the leading poet of his generation. If you enjoyed Selected Poems, you might like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, also available in Penguin Classics. 'He had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton' T.S. Eliot

‘L—d! said my mother, what is all this story about? –
A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick – and one of the best of its kind I ever heard’

Laurence Sterne’s great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate ‘hero’ Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby, and a host of other characters, including Dr Slop, Corporal Trim and the parson Yorick. A joyful celebration of the endless possibilities of the art of fiction, Tristram Shandy is also a wry demonstration of its limitations.

The text and notes of this volume are based on the acclaimed Florida Edition, with a critical introduction by Melvyn New and Christopher Ricks’s introductory essay from the first Penguin Classics edition of the novel.

THE FLORIDA EDITION

A note about Joining Music with Reason In the preface to this marvellous new anthology, its editor, Christopher Ricks, writes: Dr Johnson couched his high praise of poetry in these terms, and with reason, in The Rambler No. 86 (12 January 1751): 'The poet has this peculiar superiority, that to all the powers which the perfection of every other composition can require, he adds the faculty of joining music with reason, and of acting at once upon the senses and the passions.' Ricks was Oxford Professor of Poetry between 2004 and 2009, and during his tenure arranged for 29 poets - a roughly equal mixture of British and American, established and new - to read from their work when he was in Oxford to deliver his lectures. Joining Music with Reason brings together a generous selection of work by all of those poets:

James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894) is still highly valued as a judge, as the historian of the criminal law of England, and as the author of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, a forthright disagreement with John Stuart Mill. Stephen's weekly journalism established him as a vigorous cross-examiner in the controversies—cultural, social, religious, political, moral, and philosophical—of his time (and duly, of our time). Collected here now are his essays on the novel and journalism, the co-operation and collusion of these two, their responsibilities and irresponsibilities. Written between 1855 and 1867, while Stephen prosecuted twin careers as barrister and journalist, these reviews bring to bear his formidable powers of mind and of phrasing, scrutinizing many deep and disconcerting novelists—Dickens and Thackeray, Harriet Beecher Stowe and E. C. Gaskell, Flaubert and Balzac. His work also weighs journalism in the scales: from Addison's The Spectator to the Crimean war correspondence of William Howard Russell; from the scabrously detailed law-reports in The Times to the phenomenon of Letters to its Editor; from the high culture of Matthew Arnold to the mass market of 'Railroad Bookselling'.

In this acclaimed book, Professor Ricks argues for the importance of embarrassment in human life and for the value works of art which help us deal with embarrassment by recognizing and refining it. As a poet and a man, Keats was especially sensitive to, and morally intelligent about, embarrassment. This study demonstrates the particular direction of his insight and moral concern to acknowledge embarrassability and its involvement in important moral concerns.

'Milton's Grand Style' has been vigorously attacked in the 20th century, and this book is an attempt to refute Milton's detractors by showing the delicacy and subtlety which is to be found in the verse of Paradise Lost'.

What Maisie Knew is Henry James's damning portrait of adultery, jealousy and possession on the decadent fringe of English upper-class society. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Christopher Ricks. After her parents' bitter divorce, young Maisie Farange finds herself turned into a 'little feathered shuttlecock' to be swatted back and forth by her selfish mother, Ida, and her vain father, Beale, who value her only as a means of provoking one another. When both take lovers and remarry, Maisie - solitary, observant and wise beyond her years - is drawn into an entangled adult world of intrigue and sexual betrayal, until she is at last able to cooperate in choosing her own future. As time conquers innocence, Henry James masterfully portrays Maisie's consciousness developing from simple childlike 'wonder' to a rich, morally-scrupulous adult mind. This edition of What Maisie Knew includes a chronology, suggested further reading, three contemporary reviews, Henry James's own commentaries on the work, and an introduction that examines how children figured in his predecessors' novels, and how war is waged between the sexes in What Maisie Knew. Henry James (1843-1916) son of a prominent theologian, and brother to the philosopher William James, was one of the most celebrated novelists of the fin-de-siecle. In addition to many short stories, plays, books of criticism, biography and autobiography, and much travel writing, he wrote some twenty novels. His novella 'Daisy Miller' (1878) established him as a literary figure on both sides of the Atlantic, and his other novels in Penguin Classics include Washington Square (1880), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Awkward Age (1899), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904) If you enjoyed What Maisie Knew, you might like Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, also available in Penguin Classics. 'Embodies everything that James excelled at in fiction' Paul Theroux

With its fresh and glittering choice of the jewels of English poetry, Christopher Ricks's Oxford Book of English Verse -- third in succession, after Arthur Quiller-Couch's original volume (1900) and Helen Gardner's new selection (1972) -- is a treasury from more than seven centuries of the poet's art. Ampler in range -- up to Hughes and Heaney -- it combines celebrated poems with a wealth of newly-chosen works, giving us 'Sumer is icumen in' and Anna Seward's 'Old Cat's Dying Soliloquy', Keats's 'To Autumn' and Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market', Hugh MacDiarmid's 'O Wha's the Bride?', Stevie Smith's 'Not Waving but Drowning', Larkin's 'Mr Bleaney', and hundreds more. For the first time, wonderful poems that are also translations are included, likewise nursery rhymes, clerihews, and the great dramatic verse of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Lyric, laughter, song, satire, story: this is an anthology to move and delight all who find themselves loving English verse.

Bob Dylan's ways with words are a wonder, matched as they are with his music and verified by those voices of his. In response to the whole range of Dylan early and late (his songs of social conscience, of earthly love, of divine love, and of contemplation), this critical appreciation listens to Dylan's attentive genius, alive in the very words and their rewards.

"Fools they made a mock of sin." Dylan's is an art in which sins are laid bare (and resisted), virtues are valued (and manifested), and the graces brought home. The seven deadly sins, the four cardinal virtues (harder to remember?), and the three heavenly graces: these make up everybody's world -- but Dylan's in particular. Or rather, his worlds, since human dealings of every kind are his for the artistic seizing. Pride is anatomized in "Like a Rolling Stone," Envy in "Positively 4th Street," Anger in "Only a Pawn in Their Game" ... But, hearteningly, Justice reclaims "Hattie Carroll," Fortitude "Blowin' in the Wind," Faith "Precious Angel," Hope "Forever Young," and Charity "Watered-Down Love."

In The "New Yorker, Alex Ross wrote that "Ricks's writing on Dylan is the best there is. Unlike most rock critics -- 'forty-year-olds talking to ten-year-olds, ' Dylan has called them -- he writes for adults." In the "Times (London), Bryan Appleyard maintained that "Ricks, one of the most distinguished literary critics of our time, is almost the only writer to have applied serious literary intelligence to Dylan ..."

Dylan's countless listeners (and even the artist himself, who knows?) may agree with W.H. Auden that Ricks "is exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding."

Samuel Menashe's poetry has a mysterious simplicity, a spiritual intensity and a lingering emotional force. For over 50 years he practised his art of 'compression and crystallisation' (in Derek Mahon's phrase) in poems that are brief in form but profound in their engagement with ultimate questions. As Stephen Spender wrote, Menashe 'compresses thought into language intense and clear as diamonds'. Intensely musical and rigorously constructed, Menashe's work stands apart in its solitary meditative power, but it is equally a poetry of the everyday. The humblest of objects, the minutest of natural forms, here become powerfully suggestive, and even the shortest of the poems are spacious in the perspectives they open. Expanded from its original Library of America compilation, this edition covers the full range of his work, from the early collections to very recent work, and includes a DVD of Life Is Immense: Visiting Samuel Menashe, a film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce. This features a visit to Menashe in the tiny apartment in New York's Greenwich Village where he lived from the 1950s until 2009. Even in his 80s, Menashe still knew all his poems by heart, and between engaging digressions on poetry, life and death, recites numerous examples with engaging humour, warmth and zest.

Christopher Ricks is among the best known living critics. His third collection of essays, several newly written for this book, is strongly focused on the theme of how writers - especially but not exclusively poets - make use of other writers' work: from the subtle courtesies of different kinds of allusion to the extreme discourtesy of plagiarism. Scintillating studies from one of the absolute masters of literary-critical writing.

The successor to the highly-praised collection of Christopher Rickss The Force of Poetry, this collection of critical essays still attends to poets and poetry: to John Donnes farewells to love, George Crabbes constraints, Hardys readings of history, and Robert Lowell as translator of Racine. But other literary worlds are also appreciated in Essays in Appreciation. Drama: Marlowes Doctor Faustus and the plague. History: the Earl of Clarendon and composition. The novel: Jane Austen and mothering. Victorian lives: E. C. Gaskells Charlotte Bronte, Froudes Carlyle, Hallam Tennysons Tennyson, and George Eliot and her age. Philosophy: J. L. Austin and his art of allusion. Finally, critical questions: literature and the matter of fact, and literary principles against theory; plus two notes on current critical issuesone on talk of the canon, and the other on Empson and political criticism. literary criticism of an intellectual zestfulness which makes everyone else in the field look half asleep The Spectator Ricks's grasp of literary detail is unequalled he has a microscopic eye for distinguishment of shades of meaning, with their bearings on emotional definition Anyone who has a feeling for literature will enjoy Essays in Appreciation. If you have none, here are good reasons to cultivate it. Times Literary Supplement

Allusion to the words and phrases of ancestral voices is one of the hiding-places of poetry's power. Poets appreciate the great debts that they owe to previous poets, and are often duly and newly grateful. Allusion to the Poets consists of twelve essays - four published here for the first time - on allusion and its relations, in particular on the use that poets in English have made of the very words of poets in English. The first half of the book, on 'The Poet as Heir', consists of six chapters devoted to individual poets, Augustan, Romantic, and Victorian: Dryden and Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Tennyson. Allusion is always a form of inheritance, not to be hoarded or squandered. The critical and creative question is its imaginative co-operation with other kinds of legacy - with whatever for a particular poet or for a particular time is judged to be an unignorable inheritance: of a throne, perhaps, or of land; of intermixed languages; of the human senses; of money; of literature itself; or of our planet, long-lived but not eternal. The second half of the book is six essays on allusion's affiliations: to plagiarism (allusion being plagiarism's responsible opposite); to metaphor (allusion being a form that metaphor may take); to loneliness in poetry (allusion constituting company); to allusion within poetry to prose (on A E. Housman); to translation as exercising allusion (on David Ferry); and to the clash between one poet's practice and his critical principles (on Yvor Winters).

Most people want to live forever. But there is another truth: the longing for oblivion. With pain, wit, and humor, the art of Samuel Beckett variously embodies this truth, this ancient enduring belief that it is better to be dead than alive, best of all never to have been born. Beckett is the supreme writer of an age which has created new possibilities and impossibilities even in the matter of death and its definition--an age of transplants and life-support.
But how does a writer give life to dismay at life itself, to the not unwelcome encroachments of death, when it is for the life, the vitality of their language that we value writers? Beckett became himself as a writer when he realized in his very words a principle of death: in cliches, which are dead but won't lie down; in a dead language and its memento mori; in words which mean their own opposites, like cleaving; and in what Beckett called a syntax of weakness.
This artful study explores the relation between deep convictions about life or death and the incarnations which these take in the exact turns of a great writer, the realizations of an Irishman who wrote in English and in French, two languages with different apprehensions of life and of death."

Christopher Ricks is one of the best-known living critics of English, and was described by W. H. Auden as the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding'. Though published indepenently over many years, each of the essays in this collection of his writings asks how a poets words reveal the force of poetry', that force - in Dr Johnson's words - which calls new power into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter'. The poets covered range from John Gower, Marvell, and Milton to Wordsworth, Empson, Stevie Smith, Lowell, and Larkin, and the book contains four wider essays on clich 'es, lies, misquotations, and American English. This book is intended for undergraduates and graduates, and general readers interested in poetry and poetic language.

A great age of poetry speaks for itself in Christopher Ricks's celebrated anthology: the variety and power of Victorian verse, the innovation and creativity with which poets resisted the bad propensities of the era through which they lived.
The great figures are of course strongly represented --Tennyson and Browning, Swinburne and Hopkins--but not so as to crowd out the less expected but equally rewarding facets of light verse and nonsense, of grotesque and protest. At long last justice is done to the poignant directness of "the true voice of feeling," from William Barnes and John Clare, through Emily Jane Bronte and Christina G. Rossetti, to Thomas Hardy.