Allusion to the Poets

Allusion to the words and phrases of ancestral voices is one of the hiding-places of poetry's power. Poets appreciate the great debts that they owe to previous poets, and are often duly and newly grateful. Allusion to the Poets consists of twelve essays - four published here for the first time - on allusion and its relations, in particular on the use that poets in English have made of the very words of poets in English. The first half of the book, on 'The Poet as Heir', consists of six chapters devoted to individual poets, Augustan, Romantic, and Victorian: Dryden and Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Tennyson. Allusion is always a form of inheritance, not to be hoarded or squandered. The critical and creative question is its imaginative co-operation with other kinds of legacy - with whatever for a particular poet or for a particular time is judged to be an unignorable inheritance: of a throne,perhaps, or of land; of intermixed languages; of the human senses; of money; of literature itself; or of our planet, long-lived but not eternal. The second half of the book is six essays on allusion's affiliations: to plagiarism (allusion being plagiarism's responsible opposite); to metaphor (allusion being a form that metaphor may take); to loneliness in poetry (allusion constituting company); to allusion within poetry to prose (on A E. Housman); to translation as exercising allusion (on David Ferry); and to the clash between one poet's practice and his critical principles (on Yvor Winters).

Review from previous edition Subtly shows the way in which seven great poets have quoted their predecessors in their writings, and the richness of meaning they have gained from that., Allusion to the Poets sparkles with an enjoyment that answers repeatedly to the delighted complexity and play of alert poetic imagination: for a long time to come, all good critics will be Christopher Ricks's heirs., Brilliant, witty, and illuminating . . . No other critic in our age . . . has dared to isolate this wonderfully ramifying, richly human subject (which requires great learning, lightly worn) and given it such intensive treatment. With this book about poets and their gratitude, Ricks has earned ours.

Professor Christopher Ricks is Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University and co-director of the Editorial Institute. He has taught at Boston University since 1986; he was formerly King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. He is the general editor of two series, Penguin English Poets and Poets in Translation, and the co-editor of Essays in Criticism. In 2002 he delivered the Panizzi Lectures in Bibliography at theBritish Library.