Our Sense of Gratitude: For Christopher Ricks
Michael Autrey, ed.
(Senex Press, 2025)
In a 2021 interview with the New Statesman, Christopher Ricks said that “criticism is being good at noticing things.” Ricks has noticed many things about many writers, from William Shakespeare to Bob Dylan. In addition to his critical work, he has also been an institution builder, helping found the Editorial Institute at Boston University as well as the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. His literary efforts have won him many public honors (including a knighthood), and they have also earned a sense of gratitude and appreciation from many poets, critics, editors, and students. The scope of Ricks’ accomplishment as a critic, editor, and teacher can be seen in the new festschrift Our Sense of Gratitude. In rendering Ricks, the dozens of contributors to this volume also reveal what it means to read with a sense of gratitude.
This portrait in full has three dimensions. The first dimension portrays Ricks as a man—generous, spirited, and exacting. Ricks’ own criticism reveals a subtle eye for how language reflects physical embodiment, and many of the contributors show Ricks as embodied. He rises with a face “red as a valentine” (in Meg Tyler’s phrasing) to dispute Helen Vendler’s interpretation of William Empson. After reading a book manuscript by Philip Horne, he sends twenty-six single-spaced pages of commentary. He walks with Phillis Levin, then an aspiring young poet, to Greenwich Village’s Phoenix Book Shop, where they just so happen to run into Geoffrey Hill.
The second dimension is Ricks’ literary practice. Skeptical of high theory and repulsed by academic throat-clearing, Ricks has devoted his career to the close attention to language. “Literature is, among other things, principled rhetoric,” he writes in “Literary Principles as Against Theory,” and he views literary criticism as the principled analysis of that principled rhetoric. A lightness of touch is a natural complement to his serious attending to the varieties of words. A small detail from his essay “Literature and the Matter of Fact” illustrates how deep those principles reach in his critical practice. Fearing that George Eliot had mistakenly described the drapery of Saint Peter’s in Rome as “red” instead of “white” during a Christmas scene in Middlemarch, Ricks describes himself as “so relieved” to find out that the biographer who had accused Eliot of that mistake was himself mistaken—that Saint Peter’s used red in all liturgical seasons. For Ricks, a factual mistake would have betrayed the ethical and aesthetic aims of that passage, which reflects on our temptation to project a false understanding upon the world.
Under the aegis of Ricks, contributors to Our Sense of Gratitude show a similar attunement to verbal texture. Daniel Karlin recounts how Ricks could see the merit of Robert Browning’s line “each camel churns a sick and frothy chap”: “Didn’t the verb ‘churns’ accurately describe the sideways-sliding motion of a camel’s jaw while it chews the cud? and wasn’t this action evoked by the sound and cadence of the line itself?” There’s Laura Quinney meditating on a passage from Wordsworth’s The Prelude, William Flesch on the different gambles of Hamlet, and Lee Oser explicating C.S. Lewis’ response to three lines from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” A subtitle for this collection could be “A Catalogue of Attentiveness.”
Editing demands a sharp eye and a sensitive ear, and this collection recognizes Ricks’ major editorial labors, from his landmark edition of Tennyson to his leadership of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. Requiring a similar sharpness and sensitivity, translation also pervades this collection. George Kalogeris renders Theocritus—“a goblet, its burnished lip so freshly inscribed / With blossoming vines you can almost smell them / Unfurling”—and Bill Coyle translates Tomas Tranströmer’s “Baltics.” Reflecting on translation, the essays by Clare Cavanagh, Sarah Spence, and Rosanna Warren illustrate how translation and criticism share a recognition of the demands of language.
Warren writes that “for me, translation is a shamanistic art involving a state of possession, even sacred cannibalism,” and can’t that apply to literary criticism to some extent? The passionate critic is perhaps more possessed by a literary work than possessed of it (and should certainly not be possessive of it). Laura Quinney alludes to the “hauntedness in words,” and one of the most thrilling elements of Ricks’ own criticism is the way his analysis can, like a shaman, invoke such a range of voices. In only two pages of Keats and Embarrassment, he weaves in passages from Romeo and Juliet, Isabella, Venus and Adonis, William Empson’s introduction to Shakespeare: Narrative Poems, John Donne’s “The Ecstasy,” a letter by Keats, and Middlemarch. Speaking of the use of “put together” for Jonathan Swift and his contemporaries, Judith Hawley finds that it could mean “grafting things together to create something new (a fruit, an idea), but it could also mean juxtaposing unlike things in order to notice incongruity.” Literary-critical conjuring puts together in both those senses. Bringing together Keats and Shakespeare, Ricks creates something new, but that fusion also reveals distinctions (the associations of “sweat” in different writers, for instance).
And that leads to the third dimension: the generous capability of literary criticism, which is both a joyful tending and an imaginative adding. Lines from the beginning of Ricks’ inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry open this collection: “Gratitude is among those human accomplishments that literature lives to realize. Art enjoys the power not only to voice gratitude but to prompt it, even to restore us to a state in which grateful might come again to mean at once feeling gratitude and feeling pleasure—as though it once was, and ought always to be, impossible to be granted something gratifying and not be grateful for it.”
Michael Autrey, the editor of Our Sense of Gratitude, reflects on that passage in his penetrating introduction and observes that gratitude “compounds, unifies and unites.” Gratitude and its counterpart generosity appear throughout the collection. Susan Wolfson writes that Ricks is “as generous as he is scrupulous.” Part of the magic of criticism in the right register occurs when scrupulousness becomes an act of generosity. The scrupulous weighing of words—that attention to the responsibility of language—can be generous in heightening our understanding of the textures of a literary work as well as the rewards we receive from this work. That is, literary criticism can prompt the pleasure of informed gratitude.
While literary criticism does something very different from poetry, that grateful attending to language can nourish the soil for poetic creation. A critic can model for us how to read deeply and well. Our Sense of Gratitude contains poems from A.E. Stallings, John Burt, Archie Burnett, Ben Mazer, and others, as well as prose contributions from poets. If poet and critic sometimes fall into competition, they can also find affinities.
In affirming the attachments of literature, literary criticism attuned to gratitude steers clear of both puffy fandom and the self-annihilating hermeneutics of absolute suspicion. Vapid celebration and endless critique are both vehicles of detachment, as a horde of “likes” fills the vacuum left by the empire of deconstruction. A criticism of gratitude instead can help articulate why a work of literature is worth reading and why it is worth writing about, too. Critical judgment provides an essential compass for such an enterprise, as it helps distinguish true analysis from flattery or calumny.
Cassandra Nelson’s contribution to Our Sense of Gratitude includes a revelatory snapshot of Ricks as critic and teacher. Describing his “Bob Dylan listening parties,” Nelson writes how Ricks would “invite all comers to sit in his sunlit, book-lined office and detect minute changes to Dylan’s lyrics in bootleg live performances….coffee and tea, silent people straining their ears for a moment then arguing about what they had heard, chairs pulled up around a stereo, everyone sitting alert and attentive and happy.” This is also a picture of literary criticism when practiced with an attunement toward gratitude: listening “alert and attentive” and then conversing (sometimes arguing!) about what we have heard. In that exchange of attentive testimonies, we can feel gratitude and maybe even happiness. Reflecting on Ricks himself as well as some of his critical loves, Our Sense of Gratitude illuminates the pleasures of critical conversation as well as the rewards of full-hearted reading.