Top 6 Quotes & Sayings by Christopher Ricks

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British critic Christopher Ricks.
Last updated on September 19, 2024.
Christopher Ricks

Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (US), co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (UK) from 2004 to 2009. In 2008, he served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious ; and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous. Hugh Kenner praised his "intent eloquence", and Geoffrey Hill his "unrivalled critical intelligence". W. H. Auden described Ricks as "exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding". John Carey calls him the "greatest living critic".

Geniuses are at work in the rock music field, and great popularity is no proof you aren't good.
When a language creates - as it does - a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.
Geniuses are people who notice things and connections between things which others haven't noticed. Genius must be a surprise. — © Christopher Ricks
Geniuses are people who notice things and connections between things which others haven't noticed. Genius must be a surprise.
A great work of art is one that continues to repay attention.
For it is characteristic of true simplicity that there may radiate from its utmost directness a good many glinting things.
The fabliau, then, is a short story that is a tall story. It combines a burly blurting of dirty words with a reveling in humiliations that are good unclean fun. A popular venture that is keen to paste—épater—everybody (not just the bourgeoisie), it is the art of the single entendre. Highly staged low life, it guffaws at the pious, the prudish, and the priggish. High cockalorum versus high decorum…. The introduction here, like the translator’s note, tells well the story of the comic tales, anonymous for the most part, usually two or three hundred lines long, of which about 160 exist.
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