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 only by their critical prose but (best of all) by their acts of new creation, those poems of theirs that are thanks to Eliot and Pound.
“Opposition is true Friendship.” So William Blake believed, or at any rate hoped. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell demonstrate many kinds of friendship with Eliot and Pound: adversarial, artistic, personal. In their creative assent and dissent, the imaginative literary allusions—like other, wider forms of influence—are shown to constitute the most magnanimous of welcomes and of tributes.
“The work is not only original and the scholarship provocative and sound, but one feels in the company of the Circle of Philosophers, comforted by this Virgilian guide who is not only knowledgeable, but—even better—has such a refined sense of humor, wit, and—most rare of gifts—a humanistic pathos that rings down the ages.”—Paul Mariani, University Professor of English, Boston College
“Ricks [has a] calculating and discriminating eye.”--Library Journal
“Ricks is probably the greatest living scholar and editor of modern English-language poetry. . .a critic of unrivaled authority. His new book. . .consists of long essays on three late-twentieth-century poets. . .with particular attention to their literary debts to T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.”--Adam Kirsch, The New York Review of Books
Christopher Ricks is Warren Professor of the Humanities and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. Formerly Professor of Poetry at Oxford, he was President of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers from 2007 to 2008.
Publisher: Yale University Press
Distributor: Yale University Press
Publication Date: 03-02-2010
Pages: 272
Measurements: 8.25in X 5.50in X 0.95lb
