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Christopher Ricks (born 1933) is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University and Co-Director of the Editorial Insitute at Boston University, and since 2004 Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.

He was born in Beckenham and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first in English. He served in the Green Howards in the British Army in 1953/4 in Egypt. He held a position at Worcester College, Oxford, moving in 1968 to become Professor of English at the University of Bristol. During his time at Bristol he worked on Keats and Embarrassment (1974), in which he made the then revelatory connection between the letters and the poetry. It was also at Bristol that he first published his, still definitive, edition of Tennyson's poetry. In 1975 Ricks moves to the University of Cambridge (where he was King Edward VII Professor) before moving to BU in 1986.

He is known as a champion of Victorian poetry, for his enthusiasm for Bob Dylan, and for his opposition to literary theory.

Works

• A Dissertation Upon English Typographical Founders and Founderies 1778 by Edward Rowe Mores (1961) editor with Harry Carter
• Milton's Grand Style (1963)
• Poems and Critics (1966) anthology
• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1967) editor with Graham Petrie
• Twentieth Century Views: A. E. Housman (1968) editor
• Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained by John Milton (1968) editor
• English Poetry and Prose 1540-1674 (1970)) editor
• English Drama To 1710 (1971) editor
• The Brownings Letters and Poetry (1970) editor
• Tennyson (1972)
• A Collection of Poems By Alfred Tennyson (1972) editor
• Selected Criticism of Matthew Arnold (1972) editor
• Keats and Embarrassment (1974)
• Geoffrey Hill and the Tongue's Atrocities (1978)
• The State of the Language (1979) editor with Leonard Michaels, later edition 1990
• The Force of Poetry (1984) essays
• The Poems of Tennyson (1987) three volumes, editor
• The Tennyson Archive (from 1987) editor with Aidan Day, 31 volumes
• The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1987) editor
• T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988)
• A.E. Housman: Collected Poems and Selected Prose (1988) editor
• The Faber Book of America (1992) editor with William L. Vance
• The Golden Treasury (1991) editor
• Beckett's Dying Words (1993)
• Essays in Appreciation (1996)
• Inventions of the March Hare : Poems, 1909-1917 by T.S. Eliot (1998) editor
• The Oxford Book of English Verse (1999) editor
• Allusion to the Poets (2002)
• Selected Poems of James Henry (2002) editor
• Reviewery (2003) essays
• Dylan's Visions of Sin (2003)
• Decisions And Revisions In T.S. Eliot (2003)
• Samuel Menashe: Selected Poems (2005) editor

External links

• Editorial Institute

• English literary critics
• 1933 births
• Living people