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 en...

True Friendship looks closely at three outstanding poets of the past half-century—Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell—through the lens of their relation to their two predecessors in genius, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The critical attention then finds itself reciprocated, with Eliot and Pound being in their turn contemplated anew through the lenses of their successors. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell are among the most generously alert and discriminating readers, as is borne out not on...

'I consider myself a poet first and a musician second''It ain't the melodies that're important man, it's the words'Two quotes from Dylan himself that underline the importance of this book. Dylanology thrives. There is no shortage of books about him and many of them will be dusted off for his 70th birthday. This one, however, stands on its own both for its unusual approach and for the virtuosity of its execution.Ricks's scheme, aptly, is to examine Dylan's songs throu...

Robert Frost and Edward Thomas met in a bookshop in London in 1913. During the next four years, the two writers—Frost, an unknown poet who had sold his farm in New Hampshire in order to take his family to England for one last gamble on poetry and Thomas, a sad literary journalist—formed the most important friendship between poets since that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Their friendship only ended with Thomas' death in Arras, France, a casualty of the First World War.The story of Ed...

'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, with a rich metafictional narrative that might classify it as the first 'postmodern' novel. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, ...

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, a...

THERE ARE REASONS WE FEAR THE NIGHT. HE STILL ISN’T ONE OF THEM.My name’s Bill Ryder and six months ago I died. However, I didn’t stay dead. Instead, I woke up a vampire, freshly recruited into a coven of immortal assholes.I thought I’d earned a break after defeating our former master, with maybe a bit of help from my friends, but no such luck.Now things are getting surreal in the world of the strange. New and powerful forces are rearing th...

Regarded by many as the greatest of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne (1572-1631) was also among the most intriguing figures of the Elizabethan age. A sensualist who composed erotic and playful love poetry in his youth, he was raised a Catholic but later became one of the most admired Protestant preachers of his time. The Collected Poetry reflects this wide diversity, and includes his youthful songs and sonnets, epigrams, elegies, letters, satires, and the profoundly moving Divin...

A powerful, practical guide for cultivating compassion—the scientifically proven foundation for personal achievement and success at work, at home, and in the community.For decades, we’ve been told the key to prosperity is to look out for number one. But recent science shows that to achieve durable success, we need to be more than just achievers; we need to be compassionate achievers.New research in biology, neuroscience, and economics have found that compassion—recognizing ...

'Tennyson', wrote T. S. Eliot, 'has the finest ear of any English poet since Milton,' and his verse remains unrivalled in its combination of verbal richness, emotional depth and intellectual engagement. Tennyson drew on classical and medieval legends in poems like 'The Lotos-Eaters' (1832) and 'The Lady of Shalott' (1832) to explore the spiritual tensions of the nineteenth century. In one of the great works of his maturity, 'In Memoriam' (1850) - written after the loss of his dearest frien...

THERE ARE REASONS WE FEAR THE NIGHT. HE’S NOT ONE OF THEM.My name’s Bill and I have no life, but not because I enjoy video games or D&D. I literally have no heartbeat thanks to the night I met Sally. She was too good to be true, a woman worth dying for. So, I did.Problem is, I didn’t stay dead.Now I’m a vampire, surrounded by undead freaks who are stronger and faster than me – not to mention better looking. It’s enough to give a guy a compl...