Our Sense of Gratitude

This collection honors Christopher Ricks, the eminent textual editor and literary critic and one of the founders of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers (ALSCW), an organization thirty-one years young. In the capacious spirit of the ALSCW, this festschrift is a core sample of the generations of Ricks’s colleagues, students and friends, many now eminent in their own right, writing in a variety of genres. Essays by, among others, Judith Hawley, Hermione Lee, Peter McDonald, Seamus Perry, Sarah Spence, Rosanna Warren, Susan Wolfson and Michael Wood; memoirs by Phillis Levin, Steven Isenberg, Cassandra Nelson and Owen Boynton, and poems by, among others, A.E. Stallings, Angela Leighton and a remarkable new translation of Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer’s “Baltics” by Ricks’s former student Bill Coyle; appreciations by novelist Tim Parks and Jim McCue, Ricks’s co-editor of the Poems of T. S. Eliot. Three never-before published talks by his late colleague, the poet and critic Geoffrey Hill.