Today was my first full day participating in the Oxbridge program at Oxford. I spent the morning learning about vaccinations from Sarah Loving from the Oxford Vaccine Group. Then there was a lecture about Edward Lear by Jasmine Jagger (lots of clues such as depressions, isolation, alienation and self-hatred that Lear was gay; got that confirmed during a separate conversation with Jagger). Then the last learning event was a lecture by Christopher Ricks entitled “Literary Criticism and Principles, Starting from Dr.Johnson.”

Prof. Ricks talked about interpretation as an exercise of the imagination, arguing that only art and literature can change us — not facts or rationality. But art and other people and if we pay attention to them, really pay attention to them, we can get access to truths/systems/perspectives which are not our own.

Born in 1933, Prof. Ricks has a perspective on literature and life and history which is seasoned by the wisdom gathered from years of study, teaching, learning, and writing. His comments showed that he is acutely attuned to current events and particularly the travesty in the USA as he sprinkled into his hour-long talk references to fake news and lies. He did quote from memory something Benjamine Disraeli said: “Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the important thing in life is to know when to forgo an advantage.” That is something politicians in the USA have forgotten entirely in the intense partisan war (I had written bickering but that was too mild a word and could only be used as an instance of litotes). No one is willing to overlook a chance to injure the other side or push a piece of legislation.

But besides the political and the talk was much more than just politics which was really only a side-bar, was that Ricks unashamedly practices close reading of I.A. Richards. He provided us with two poems by the poet William Barnes whom I had never heard of. One was “Sister Gone” and he carefully went over the technique of the rhyme scheme and sound patterns but then elaborated on how the reader’s sensibilities to sound gives the poem a more melancholy message of the inevitability of change. In the case of the poem, one sister marries and leaves another sister behind in the darkness of the lilac.

He asserted that the best critics are poets and not novelists and then proceeded to name as evidence: Eliot, Keat, Shelley, Pound, Coleridge. Then he mentioned that Charlotte Bronte was a brutal critic of Austen whom she despised and that comment made me smile.

Ricks also offered up tidbits of perspective on lines of King Lear and the character of Macbeth. I will return to those later but must get ready now for dinner which is served promptly at 6:30. I am told they get quite irritated if you are late!