True Friendship Christopher Ricks

"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.

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.

"'This is a profoundly rewarding book about poetry for the non-academic reader; hardly surprising when the author is the most brilliant reader of poetry of his generation.' (Harry Eyres, Financial Times) 'True Friendship... like all of Rick's books, is a book to be grateful for.' (London Review of Books) 'This is a fascinating, challenging, demanding, intently interior, almost forensic work... for those to whom poetry is more a way of life than a lifestyle, the real deal.' (Gerald Dawe, Irish Times)"