Christopher Ricks

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Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks FBA FRSL, born 18 September 1933, is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, co-director of the Editorial Institute there, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford from 2004 to 2009. In 2008 he served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.

Ricks is known as a champion of Victorian poetry and for his work on Bob Dylan’s lyrics. He is a sharp critic of writers he sees as pretentious, such as Marshall McLuhan and Stanley Fish, and a warm reviewer of those he finds humane or humorous, like F. R. Leavis and W. K. Wimsatt. Some fellow critics have praised his intellect and eloquence, and he has been described by others as one of the greatest living critics.

He was born in Beckenham, England, the younger son of James Bruce Ricks and Gabrielle Roszak. He went to King Alfred’s School, Wantage, and then to Balliol College, Oxford, where he earned a BA in English (1956), a B.Litt (1958), and an MA (1960). He served in the Green Howards in the British Army in 1953–54 in Egypt.

Ricks began his academic career as a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Worcester College, Oxford. In 1968 he moved to the University of Bristol as Professor of English, where he worked on Keats and Embarrassment (1974) and published a definitive edition of Tennyson’s poetry. In 1975 he moved to the University of Cambridge, becoming King Edward VII Professor of English Literature in 1982. He joined Boston University in 1986. In June 2011 it was announced he would join New College of the Humanities in London. He was knighted in 2009 and elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1970.

Ricks is known for favoring close, text-focused reading over theory-heavy criticism. He has opposed post-structuralist and postmodern approaches and favors a Johnsonian, empirically grounded method. He believes literature is, at its core, principled rhetoric.