Essays in appreciation

by Christopher B. Ricks

The successor to Christopher Ricks's The Force of Poetry, this collection of critical essays still attends to poets and poetry: to John Donne's farewells to love, George Crabbe's constraints, Hardy's reading of history, and Robert Lowell as translator of Racine. But other literary worlds are also appreciated in Essays in Appreciation. Drama: Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the plague. History: the Earl of Clarendon and composition. The novel: Jane Austen and mothering. Victorian lives: E. C. Gaskell's Charlotte Bronte; Froude's Carlyle; Hallam Tennyson's Tennyson; and George Eliot and her age. Philosophy: J. L. Austin and his art of allusion. Finally, critical questions: Literature and the matter of fact, and literary principles as against theory; plus two notes on criticism at the present time, one on talk of the canon, and the other on Empson and political criticism.