The Force of Poetry

"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."