Milton's Grand Style

by Christopher Ricks

Milton's Grand Style has been vigorously attacked in the twentieth century, and this book is an attempt to refute Milton's detractors by showing the delicacy and subtlety which is to be found in the verse of `Paradise Lost'

Genres: Literary Criticism, Criticism, Poetry, Literature, Nonfiction

164 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

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

[Felicity · Rating 3 out of 5]

This sixty-year-old study of Milton's style has the appeal of a literary curiosity, tedious if you don't like close readings of a text, masterful if you do. Ricks produces a model defence of Milton's grandiloquence, thoroughly substantiated by the text, not a manifesto for future readings.