Publisher's Synopsis
The successor to the highly-praised collection of Christopher Ricks's essays The Force of Poetry, this collection of lively and provoking critical essays still attends to poets and poetry: to John Donne's farewells to love, George Crabbe's constraints, Hardy's reading of history, and Robert Lowell as translator of Racine. But other literary worlds are also appreciated, including...Drama - Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the plague History - the Earl of Clarendon and composition The novel - Jane Austen and mothering Victorian lives - E. C. Gaskell's Charlotte Bronte; Froude's Carlyle; Hallam Tennyson's Tennyson; George Eliot and her age Philosophy - J. L. Austin and his art of allusion Finally, Essays in Appreciation examines critical questions: Literature and the matter of fact, and literary principles as against theory; and offers two notes on criticism at the present time, one on talk of the canon, and the other on Empson and political criticism.
