True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound (The Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities Series) - Hardcover

"A masterpiece of criticism."-Lawrence Joseph, Commonweal -- Lawrence Joseph * Commonweal * "[Christopher Ricks] is, in every sense, an annotator of genius."--Paul Dean, The New Criterion -- Paul Dean * The New Criterion * "This is the pleasure of reading Christopher Hicks's True Friendship-the mysterious overlapping of influence-how a threesome of influence of Pound, Eliot and Danta becomes a foursome completed by Lowell who invokes Dante in Lowell's sonnets as in much of Eliot and Pound."-Harriet Zinnes, The Hollins Critic -- Harriet Zinnes * The Hollins Critic * "Ricks is probably the greatest living scholar and editor of modern English-language poetry. . .a critic of unrivaled authority. His new book. . .consists of long essays on three late-twentieth-century poets. . .with particular attention to their literary debts to T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound." - Adam Kirsch, The New York Review of Books -- Adam Kirsch * The New York Review of Books * "Ricks [has a] calculating and discriminating eye." - Library Journal * Library Journal * "The work is not only original and the scholarship provocative and sound, but one feels in the company of the Circle of Philosophers, comforted by this Virgilian guide who is not only knowledgeable, but-even better-has such a refined sense of humor, wit, and-most rare of gifts-a humanistic pathos that rings down the ages."-Paul Mariani, University Professor of English, Boston College -- Paul Mariani

True Friendship looks closely at three outstanding poets of the past half-century-Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell-through the lens of their relation to their two predecessors in genius, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The critical attention then finds itself reciprocated, with Eliot and Pound being in their turn contemplated anew through the lenses of their successors. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell are among the most generously alert and discriminating readers, as is borne out not only by their critical prose but (best of all) by their acts of new creation, those poems of theirs that are thanks to Eliot and Pound. "Opposition is true Friendship." So William Blake believed, or at any rate hoped. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell demonstrate many kinds of friendship with Eliot and Pound: adversarial, artistic, personal. In their creative assent and dissent, the imaginative literary allusions-like other, wider forms of influence-are shown to constitute the most magnanimous of welcomes and of tributes.