Sir Christopher Ricks at Western University

Literary critic and scholar, champion of Victorian poetry and Bob Dylan enthusiast Sir Christopher Ricks visits the Department of English & Writing at Western University and gives a talk entitled "Mr. Eliot's Mr. Apollinax"
Filmed at Western University, October 2016.

[@stevekoenig3246]

Thank you, Sir Christopher Ricks, for this wonderful discussion of 'Mr. Apollinax.' It was very helpful for deciphering a poem which was already delightful.

[@loriscunado3607]

This is great but too quiet to listen to with pleasure. Which is disappointing as Ricks is an interesting bloke and all I know about poetry I owe to Ricks. I longed to be his friend or perhaps his son.He was forty when I first met him, already bald, he reminded me of my late father risen from the dead. His collars stick out over his lapels. I once saw him though in jeans and jean jacket, the denim professor, at Earls Court in London when his and my great hero played the arena there. We were his students.

[@reaganwiles_art]

T.S. Eliot is among the difficult artists, the self-contradictory, his works seem to have been written despite all that he held most dear. In a way Eliot is like Dostoyevsky, in that the works are in contradistinction to what the man valued; rather, the characters and personae repudiate the artist himself. The challenge is to believe that these works of art do not actually represent the deepest character of the men who created them. There is in everything Eliot wrote the knell of doom; we won't be fooled by any "knot of fire" and "rose" at the end of "Little Gidding!" Nor by any rationalization about Aristophanes re: Sweeney Agonistes!

[@Starwardic]

Eliot was always attuned to the knell of doom, but especially prior to the comfort he received from the Anglican faith. He was honest enough not to Christianize the pre-conversion poems. For most of his British residence, he lived in London: the seat of Saint Paul's Cathedral, and also, in the district called Whitechapel, the venue of the Ripper's brutal murders of whores. The challenge is not as you define it above, which definition---I respectfully suggest---begs or avoids the question. The challenge is to believe that the lunatic can become a proclaimer of the Gospel (the Garadene man), and a hired thug can become the Apostle Paul; and the most brutal method ever devised to destroy a human body, the Roman cross, can become the supreme symbol of the salvation that restores both spirit and body.

[@purpledanny1958]

The recording is apallingly bad!