True Friendship

“[From a] critic of unrivaled authority . . .[E]ssays on three late-twentieth-century poets. . . .[and] their literary debts to T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.” — Adam Kirsch, The New York Review of Books

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.

“A masterpiece of criticism.” —Lawrence Joseph, Commonweal

“Original and . . .provocative . . .one feels in the company of the Circle of Philosophers, comforted by this Virgilian guide who is not only knowledgeable, but—even better—has such a refined sense of humor, wit, and—most rare of gifts—a humanistic pathos that rings down the ages.” —Paul Mariani, Boston College

“[Christopher Ricks] is, in every sense, an annotator of genius.” —Paul Dean, The New Criterion