Yale University Press
Price: $28.00
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CHRISTOPHER RICKS
discusses
True Friendship:
Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound
Harvard Book Store is very pleased to welcome distinguished professor and director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, CHRISTOPHER RICKS for a conversation about his new book, True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound, an in-depth exploration of the nature of artistic influence in the work of several important poets. True Friendship looks closely at three outstanding poets of the past half-century—Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell—through the lens of their relation to their two predecessors in genius, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The critical attention then finds itself reciprocated, with Eliot and Pound being in their turn contemplated anew through the lenses of their successors. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell are among the most generously alert and discriminating readers, as is borne out not only by their critical prose but (best of all) by their acts of new creation, those poems of theirs that are thanks to Eliot and Pound.
“Opposition is true Friendship.” So William Blake believed, or at any rate hoped. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell demonstrate many kinds of friendship with Eliot and Pound: adversarial, artistic, personal. In their creative assent and dissent, the imaginative literary allusions—like other, wider forms of influence—are shown to constitute the most magnanimous of welcomes and of tributes.
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Christopher Ricks is Warren Professor of the Humanities and
Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. Formerly
Professor of Poetry at Oxford, he was President of the Association of
Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers from 2007 to 2008.
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