"When a language creates – as it does – a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past."
Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (US), co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (UK) from 2004 to 2009. In 2008, he served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.
"Taste, discretion, and decision have, one likes to think, been exercised so as to manifest the variety of an ages poems, the felicitous heterogeneity, the diverting diversity, and the buoyant resistance which a world of poems will always put up even to the best literary historians summary justice."
"[T]o travesty or to calumniate the Victorians is still such a cheap holiday."
"[I]t is characteristic of true simplicity that there may radiate from its utmost directness a good many glinting things."
"[The test of value in a work of art is] whether or not it continues to repay attention."
"Inerrancy about ones own powers is not a mark of the Victorian poets, nor even is a simple prudence about not over-reaching or over-archaizing. The Victorian poetaster over weens."
"[M]ost of us are not good at appreciating the poetry of those appreciably younger than we are."