Author:
Ricks, Christopher, 1933- author.
Edition Statement:First edition.
ImprintOxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2021.
Imprint2021
Descriptionix, 330 pages ; 22 cm
Note:The best words in the best order -- The anagram -- Dryden's heroic triplets -- T.S. Eliot and 'wrong'd Othello' -- Congratulations -- The novelist as critic -- Henry James and the hero of the story -- John Jay Chapman and a vocation for heroism -- T.S. Eliot, Byron, and leading actors -- Geoffrey Hill's grievous heroes -- Norman Mailer, just off the rhythm -- Ion Bugan on the Iron Curtain -- Heroic work by Samuel Johnson and Samuel Beckett.
Bibliography Note:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Note:"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." --Dust jacket.
