Dylan's Visions of Sin

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."

Arts & Photography

Ricks, Christopher

Music

Ecco

A scholarly analysis of Bob Dylan's lyrics by a Boston University humanities professor discusses the musician's works as a reflection of social conscience, earthly and divine love, and spiritual temptation. Reprint. 40,000 first printing.

Reviewery

"Reviewery" collects in one volume 50 pieces by a writer whom many regard as our greatest literary critic. Ricks writes compellingly about novelists (Waugh, Joyce and Henry James), about poets (Larkin and Eliot), about filmmakers (Kubrick and Coppola), sociologists (Goffman and McLuhan), photographers (Capa) and music makers. The result is an account of the cultural landscape of the 20th century.

Literature & Fiction

Penguin

"As critic and scholar he calls tremendously on his knowledge of literature past and present to provide new insights, aspects and illuminations....Ricks looks at poetry over a considerable range, a lively critic who assures us through clarifying analysis of its power and force in our lives."--The New York Times Book Review. "A work of enormous brilliance."--Encounter. "The richness and variety of these essays is truly remarkable."--Listener. Though published independently over many years, each of these penetrating essays asks how a poet's words reveal "the force of poetry"--that force, in Dr. Johnson's words, "which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter." The poets treated here range from John Gower to Robert Lowell, and include Marvell, Milton, Johnson, Wordsworth, Philip Larkin, and Geoffrey Hill. Ricks has also added four essays on general topics: on cliches, on lies, on misquotations, and on American literature in its relation to the transitory. The Force of Poetry reveals the quality of Ricks's criticism that W.H. Auden responded to when he described him as "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding."

The Force of Poetry

Oxford University Press

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.

Beckett's Dying Words: The Clarendon Lectures 1990 (Clarendon Lectures in English)

British & Irish

Essays in Appreciation

In Essays in Appreciation, Christopher Ricks continues the work of his highly-praised The Force of Poetry, with lively and provoking essays on poets and poetry. In addition, Ricks puts his appreciative pen in the service of other literary figures and genres, including drama, the novel, history and philosophy, and a discussion of Victorian biographies. Ricks wraps up the collection with a series of critical questions on literature and theory; plus two notes-on the canon, and on Empson and political criticism. W.H. Auden once wrote of Christopher Ricks that "he is exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding;" with this latest volume every scholar as well as serious reader will join the poet in finding much to appreciate.

United States

Product Description 
A selection of new and revised essays from eminent scholar and critic Professor Christopher Ricks.\nChristopher 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.\nAlong 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.\nReview 
"Ricks corrects easy critical assumptions in ways that would entertain any literature lover [.. .] Ricks' close readings go beyond mere opinion: he is showing you exactly what the poet was up to." -- John Mullan, Prospect\n"Ricks, our greatest living critic, restores a world to coherence that seemed to be dissolving into the Twittersphere" -- Lee Oser, 
Literary Matters \n"Full of verbal fireworks, witty quick-changing tones, highly stimulating to say the least." -- William H. Pritchard, Hudson Review\nAbout the Author \nChristopher Ricks is the author of 
Milton's Grand Style (1963), 
Tennyson, Keats and Embarrassment, The Force of Poetry, T.S.Eliot and Prejudice, Beckett's Dying Words, Essays in Appreciation, Allusion to the Poets, Dylan's Visions of Sin, and 
True Friendship. He edited 
The New Oxford Book of\nVictorian Verse and 
The Oxford Book of English Verse, The Poems of Tennyson, and (with Lisa Nemrow and Julie Nemrow) 
Bob Dylan: The Lyrics, as well as (with Jim McCue) 
The Poems of T.S.Eliot (2015).

Along Heroic Lines

Essays & Correspondence

"As critic and scholar he calls tremendously on his knowledge of literature past and present to provide new insights, aspects and illuminations....Ricks looks at poetry over a considerable range, a lively critic who assures us through clarifying analysis of its power and force in our lives."--The New York Times Book Review. "A work of enormous brilliance."--Encounter. "The richness and variety of these essays is truly remarkable."--Listener. Though published independently over many years, each of these penetrating essays asks how a poet's words reveal "the force of poetry"--that force, in Dr. Johnson's words, "which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter." The poets treated here range from John Gower to Robert Lowell, and include Marvell, Milton, Johnson, Wordsworth, Philip Larkin, and Geoffrey Hill. Ricks has also added four essays on general topics: on cliches, on lies, on misquotations, and on American literature in its relation to the transitory. The Force of Poetry reveals the quality of Ricks's criticism that W.H. Auden responded to when he described him as "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding."

Milton's Grand Style has been vigorously attacked in the twentieth 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'

Milton's Grand Style

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 clichés, 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.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ricks, Christopher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ricks, Christopher

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ricks, Christopher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Dylan's Visions of Sin

Dylan's Visions of Sin

Reviewery

The Force of Poetry

Beckett's Dying Words: The Clarendon Lectures 1990 (Clarendon Lectures in English)

Essays in Appreciation

Along Heroic Lines

The Force of Poetry

Milton's Grand Style

Beckett's Dying Words: The Clarendon Lectures 1990 (Clarendon Lectures in English)