Introduction
POEMS
Index of Authors
Index of Foreign Authors in Translation or Imitation
Index of Titles and First Lines
One of the best-known living literary critics.
The W. H. Auden quotation (see Full Description) is from a review
of Ricks's Longman edition of Tennyson. He writes: 'Reading
Professor Ricks's comments and observations convinces me that he is
exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding. No poet
wants either uncritical admirers or decoders who discover in his
poems secret symbols and meanings which never entered his mind. But
every poet thinks of himself as a craftsman, a maker of verbal
objects: what he hopes for is that critics
will notice the technical means by which he secures his effects.
Alas, so few critics do. Professor Ricks is a happy exception.'
Ricks has an exceptionally sharp but benevolent eye for what is canonical, and also for what might shine, were the dust blown off it ... his selection is reliable and enterprising ... although authoritative, his book has about it a satisfying openness and variety. Andrew Motion, Financial Times, 9/10/99 Ricks, I am pleased to see, has included no weak poems as concessions to "diversity," the poems in his Oxford Book of English Verse are almost uniformly worth reading, and the ones that fall below the usual level are included for a reason (for example, "Twinkle, twinkle little star") ... Gardner had a taste for the high and the holy. Ricks is more skeptical and more wide-ranging. He has a better sense of humor and he includes more light verse ... Ricks has an unmatched range of knowledge about English poetry ... it remains true that anthologies are the route by which young people find poets, and that this one is full of good introductions to good poets. Helen Vendler, The New Republic, 15/11/99 The event to celebrate is the marvellous new edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse ... a treasure-house laid up in deliberate succession to Palgrave's Treasury ... it could not have been better done. Here are poems to remember, poems to make part of one's being, the movement of one's own mind. David Sexton, Evening Standard, 7/10/99 Ricks has steered a canny course between tradition and innovation ... Someone had to take on the enormous - and political - job of deciding what is pestilence and what is poetry, what is worth keeping and what worth forgetting ... Ricks has performed that Herculean task splendidly. Robert MacFarlane, Independent on Sunday, 3/10/99 hefty and handsome volume ... Ricks shows that, although his tastes are much more catholic, he has as sharp an ear as "Q" for the particular pleasure of lyric ... His is the first Oxford Book adequately to mark out the relations between English and Scottish poetry, and the generosity of his selection from Anglo-Welsh changes the twentieth-century picture ... his selection of poems is rewardingly the work of an exceptional critic. John Kerrigan, TLS 15/10/99
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