T. S. Eliot and Prejudice by Ricks, Professor Christopher [24 January 1994]

by Christopher Ricks

Paperback. Good condition, crease along hinge of front cover, page block is tanned, clear, clean and tight.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Poetry

Paperback

First published December 31, 1988

About the author

Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks, FBA, is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (U.S.) and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (England) from 2004 to 2009. He is the immediate past-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 (Marshall McLuhan, Christopher Norris, Geoffrey Hartman, Stanley Fish); and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous (F. R. Leavis, W. K. Wimsatt, Christina Stead). Hugh Kenner has 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'.

Reviews

[Liam Guilar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book moves through the issues surrounding Prejudice as they apply to Eliot’s career. Not just Eliot’s fairly well documented anti Semitism, but the way his poems invite and expose the prejudices of his readers and critics, and the way the tensions between those two change as his career progresses.

Eliot’s own prejudices in the poems aren’t that hard to identify. What I think is very valuable is the way Ricks looks at critical/readerly prejudice.
The first chapter, dealing with Prufrock and Other Observations is almost hypnotic. Ricks riffs, there no other word for it, on the title of the poem. And then, by comparing readings of two lines: “in the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo’ he exposes the way critical prejudice does things with words the words themselves can’t support. As Ricks makes clear, most readings of those lines assume that the women can’t be saying anything important.

His treatment of Eliot’s anti-Semitism makes no attempt to exonerate him.

It’s probably a tribute to his book that in a discussion of critical prejudice and presuppositions, I became aware of his: (p29), discussing Anti-Semitism in ‘Gerontion’, he makes a legitimate attempt at distinguishing between the views of ‘Gerontion’ and Geronation: “The consciousness in Gerontion after all is not offered as healthy sane and wise; who would wish to be he, and what endorsement is then being asked for the thoughts of his dry brain in its dry season.” He seems to rely on an assumed common understanding of “healthy sane and wise” and the rhetorical question “who would wish to be he” slides round the possibility that one has met people with these values who would quite happily acknowledge them, just as there are those who might find “dry brain” in a dry season” not enough to position a reader against them.

Reading Ricks on poetry is both a pleasure and a challenge.

It’s a challenge because he’s always stretching what I think of as “a reasonable reading” and I often have the impression that I’m not quite understanding everything and need to go back and try it all again.

It’s a pleasure because of his prose, his ability to make fine and meaningful distinctions in a precise vocabulary and syntax. It’s a pleasure to read someone paying poetry the verbal attention it so obviously requires. And it feels like taking your brains to the gym for a ferocious work out.

If the book has a flaw it’s the lack of an overarching argument, or a sense of summing up at the end. I may have missed both but like Rick’s other books, it will reward many rereadings anyway.