The force of poetry.

"EVERY USER of language, whatever his or her politics, is engaged not only in conversation but in conservation," writes Christopher Ricks; yet "the extent to which the conservative interest within language predominates varies greatly from one society to another." Since the deaths of Auden and Trilling, no one has written more judiciously and sensitively the Ricks about both English and American literature and culture and their relations. Consider a comment on attitudes toward language and change:

The American writer, or citizen, will sometimes not even try to arrest a process of toxic decay. The English writer, or citizen, will sometimes not even try to apprehend that a process of decay need not be toxic.

Yet the fine, and finely titled, essay from which this comes, "American English and the Inherently Transitory," contains a persuasive appreciation of the poetry of Bob Dylan, and argues that the best contemporary American poets "convey the poignancy of there being nothing final" or lasting in their environing culture. Ricks notes the pathos of Dylan's sense (in "When You Gonna Wake Up") of the dominance of the ephemeral, as opposed by the memorable line he quotes from the Bible: "Strengthen the things that remain."

Yet Ricks is not mainly an enthusiast of popular culture but, in the best sense, a mandarin, a member of the "clerisy" of which Coleridge spoke. He occupies probably the most distinguished and influential of all chairs of English literature, at Cambridge University, where one of his predecessors was the eminent literary historian and moralist Basil Willey. Yet within his profession Ricks recently brought hostility down on his own head for traducing the state of fashionable literary criticism. He then had the temerity to tell Newsweek, ever-present when neophilia is threatened, that it was the job of English faculties "to teach and up-hold the canon of English literature."

No one living writes about this canon more intelligently or eloquently than Ricks, the author of highly esteemed books on Milton, Keats, and Tennyson, and a distinguished editor of texts. His introduction to the Signet paperback edition of Milton's "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained" is one of the finest literary essays I have ever read, showing in brief why Milton is a great poet and why such a great poet is important to people other than students, professors, and aesthetes. Milton's principles and his practice make him "the great enemy of aestheticism," which (with its grimacing opposite, socialist realism) is the great artistic treason of the modern world:

Art for art's sake? Art for God's sake. Archibald MacLeish gave aestheticism a witty shape: "Poems should not mean but be." W. B. Yeats gave aestheticism a tragic tone: "Words alone are certain good." But words are not enough for Milton, though his are certainly good.

No degenerate son, Ricks is neither afraid of nor antagonistic toward the great central metaphysical/religious tradition that our literary canon has borne and borne witness to, whether he is writing about the fine contemporary English Christian poet Geoffrey Hill or about Milton:

"Just are the ways of God," says the Chorus in Samson Agonistes--but they do not leave it that: "And justifiable to men." Dr. Johnson insisted that in Paradise Lost Milton's "purpose was the most useful and the most arduous . . . to show the reasonableness of religion."

Against the feckless specialists and aesthetic nihilists Ricks quotes Empson's assertion that "the idea that there actually couldn't be a moral debate in a literary work amounts to a collapse of the Western mind."

The volume under review contains essays written over the last twenty years, including one on Chaucer's friend John Gower and others on Marvell, Milton ("Sound and Sense in Paradise Lost," a powerful and hauntingly beautiful essay: ". . . such poetry is not unfelt. It interposes its timely aid, and its dominion checks the night"), Dr. Johnson, Wordsworth, and a host of minor poets and contemporary poets, including Lowell, Larkin, and Geoffrey Hill. Ricks writes a prose in full possession of vast, mediated, concentrated reading and experience; as a kind of creed his revision of an assertion of Pound's is apt and affecting: "All values ultimately go into our judicial sentences."

My only quarrel with this volume of Rick's criticism is that there are not two of them. Besides the introduction to the Signet Milton, a second volume would contain, for instance, Rick's riposte to Professor Bloom's attack on T. S. Eliot, which represents "the envious usupation which a critic would like to practice, and which he plucks up courage to practice as soon as there are no great poets alive to chasten his smaller, much less important creativity"; his critique of our lethal liberationisms: "So constraints become, not ever the valued resistance which alone can make possible true freedom or true creativity, but always a hindrance, an infringement, a curtailment"; his willingness publicly and inprint to quote Eliot's shockingly orthodox assertion: "It seems to me that all of us, so far as we attach ourselves to created objects and surrender our wills to temporal ends, are eaten by the same worms"; his mistrust of contemporary artistic solipsism: "Self-reflection is a good partner, but it is not good enough to be any art's master"; and the marvelous lecture on "T. S. Eliot and Prejudice," delivered at Columbia University and elsewhere over the last five years.

Yet there are riches in profusion, worlds within words, in The Force of Poetry, as when Ricks writes of Milton's depiction of Satan in Paradise Lost that the "poetry is of a kind which is deeply suspicious (rightly, to my mind) of the treacherous glissade from empathy to sympathy." This is worthy of being put beside Lord Acton's meditation: "There is a popular saying of Madame de Stael . . . that we forgive whatever we really understand. The paradox has been judiciously pruned by her descendant, the Duc de Broglie, in the words: 'Beware of too much explaining, lest we end by too much excusing.'" Is this not, indeed, the "treacherous glissade" the modern liberal mind has made, to its moral ruin?

Ricks's use of quotation and iteration are enormously skillful and potent; he "strengthens the things that remain," the literary canon and the values contained in it, by refusing to forget or let go of them. As sensitively and hospitably open to the new as he is, it is true also of him what he says of dr. Johnson, that "life and literature are [for him] in more danger from our forgetting or losing the things that we possess than from our failing to find new things."

Suffused as our culture is by the degrading subjectivism of modernity, we should avail ourselves of the quality that Ricks's criticism shares with Milton's poetry, of which he writes: "It praises a verity external to itself. . . . It assumes that the truth is in its way as 'external' to us as is the light of day." As long as he continues to write this ruly and well, Ricks should be forgiven for not announcing his allegiance to the Word more explicitly to the agnostic and atheistic sanhedrin of his profession. It might cost him his job, and in the meantime he interposes timely aid.