In Along Heroic Lines (2021), the critic Christopher Ricks lays out an aesthetics in a single sentence: 

Art enjoys the power not only to voice gratitude but to prompt it, even to restore us to a state in which grateful might come again to mean at once feeling gratitude and feeling pleasure—as though it once was, and ought always to be, impossible to be granted something gratifying and not be grateful for it.

I say this sentence offers an aesthetics, and it does: art creates the conditions in which pleasure brings about gratitude and gratitude itself becomes a form of pleasure. Ricks’s sentence also offers an ethics: we ought to be grateful for the things that gratify us. (“Gratitude is among those human accomplishments literature lives to realize,” he adds.) Ricks isn’t a believing Christian, but his first book was Milton’s Grand Style (1973), and his description of the state brought about by art resembles Milton’s Eden, where pleasure isn’t selfish but generative, even holy.

“To love and admire an author ought not to seem strange in the world of literary scholarship,” Daniel Karlin writes in Our Sense of Gratitude, an impressive volume of essays and reflections celebrating Ricks’s decades as a writer, teacher, editor, mentor, and friend (Senex Press, $35, 260 pp.). To love and admire an author ought not to seem strange but it does; so many scholars wear an air of knowing more and better than their subjects. Not Ricks. He always seems to believe that his beloved poets—Milton, Keats, Eliot, Hopkins, Hecht, Hill—know more than he does. Or, rather, he gives the sense that their language knows more than he does, than they do, than all of us ever do. For Ricks, the critic is in the business of catching at what he calls felicities: those seeming accidents of language that end up being revelatory, “felicities being exactly such effects as happily befall by benign casualty.” (In “happily befall,” we again hear Milton’s reverberating presence.) In an essay on a poem by Austin Clarke, Ricks asserts that “the anagram may repay prayer,” noting how, in the poem’s concluding lines, the word “‘silent’ is metamorphosed, with effortless felicity…into ‘listen.’” He goes on: “When ‘silent’ becomes ‘listen’ before our very eyes, our ears may listen for ever to or for the silent intimation.” Puns, rhymes, and other kinds of literary felicity, in the works Ricks considers and in his own critical writing, restore us to a state in which words aren’t stingy but generous: word echoing word, syllable calling out to syllable, all leading to more and greater meaning.

Michael Autrey, the editor of Our Sense of Gratitude, writes that Ricks has “helped us to remember that our work as critics begins in noticing, and need not strive for knowledge, ultimate or otherwise.” This may be so, though Ricks also has shown how critics might responsibly strive for, and share with others, knowledge: Keats and Embarrassment (1974) demonstrates how, as Ricks writes, “the youthful, the luxuriant, the immature, can be, not just excusable errors, but vantage-points”; Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2004) persuasively argues that Bob Dylan is “one of the great rhymesters of all time” (the Nobel Committee certainly was persuaded); The Poems of T. S. Eliot (2015), which Ricks coedited with Jim McCue, gives clear outlines to, but never explains away the mystery of, the “compound ghost” that is Eliot’s work. Still, Autrey’s point is well taken. The critic’s main task, as Ricks frequently reminds us, is to notice things, and critical noticing begins from a position of interpretive humility—from the desire not to master a text but to come to see what it sees, hear what it hears. As Cassandra Nelson writes in a lovely essay in Our Sense of Gratitude, studying with Ricks at Boston University’s Editorial Institute “began the long, slow process of facing up to my own inadequacy in matters of perception, cognition, expression, diligence.” We begin to read well, or at least better, when we admit our own inadequacy to the thing before us.

In that same essay, Nelson notes Ricks’s “magnanimity and the way that it pours out good things on anyone fortunate enough to be near him.” Our Sense of Gratitude abounds with examples of Ricks’s magnanimity: toward other scholars and poets, especially young ones (the poet Phillis Levin met him at the age of twenty-five and immediately realized that “hearing Professor Ricks attend to commas and semicolons—in a sentence or a line—was a mouthwatering experience”); toward children (“one of the things that always impressed me is how much Christopher loves babies,” Levin writes); but especially toward poems and poetry. Our Sense of Gratitude has varied offerings. There are poems of tribute from A. E. Stallings and others. “They are lovers of the word,” Stallings writes of critics like Ricks (and there aren’t many like him). “For love’s precision, to discern / The song in songster, trilling bird, / Or sea-girls in the ocean’s churn.” There are samplings of Ricks as email correspondent and conversationalist. From Jeffrey Gutierrez: 

With plans to travel to England in Summer 2016, I asked Christopher for Geoffrey Hill’s address…. My travel plans fell through. Hill died in June. In the Fall, meeting to discuss the progress of my dissertation of William Carlos Williams, I mentioned that Hill died before I could see him. “That was rude of him.”

There are essays that barely mention Ricks but do him homage by their Ricksian readings of Shakespeare and Mailer, Dickinson and Woolf. Lee Oser’s contribution opens, “C. S. Lewis’s poetic response to T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ captures what Christopher Ricks calls ‘the profound vexation which Eliot pristinely inspired.’” (“Pristinely inspired” is the Ricks style in miniature.) Oser then offers a reading of Lewis’s vexation that is rigorous, judicious, and tactful: words one associates with Ricks’s own style of criticism.

Ricks watches language with great vigilance—as Steven Isenberg puts it, he “listen[s] with seismographic attentiveness”—and his students and peers often feel, or fear, his presence looming over their own critical pronouncements. In Our Sense of Gratitude, Mark Halliday, after quoting a selection from Ricks’s Essays in Appreciation (1996), writes, “The Eliot/Forster passage is an example of Christopher’s fabulous vitality in adducing. (‘Vitality in adducing’—is this a phrase Christopher would approve of? You and I have asked this question about hundreds or thousands of phrases we’ve come up with.)” Susan Wolfson remembers sending Ricks an early piece she wrote on Keats’s letters: 

He wrote back, on what seemed a return-mail postcard, thanking me, but hoping I might outgrow some verbal afflictions: “strategize,” when no military operation was afoot; “resonance” when nothing was being sounded; uninteresting flatliners such as “interesting”; rhetorical burps such as “thus,” “in fact,” “indeed,” “of course.”

All the way back in 1971, Ricks wrote that George Steiner’s criticism displayed “the style…of plumped resonance, aspiring to poetry and as usual mistaking it for the poetic.” For Ricks, literature is no mean thing. This means that he sometimes must be harsh, or at least scrupulously exacting, with those who write it, or write about it, badly.

Ricks’s own scrupulous editorial standards demand that I note some mistakes made in Our Sense of Gratitude. There are several unclosed quotations; most essays have footnoted citations but some don’t; the formatting for epigraphs seems to vary piece by piece. Still, the book is, as Michael Wood says of Ricks’s own T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, “full of shrewd, subtle troubling writing.” One of the book’s delights is the generosity with which its contributors quote from Ricks. Here he is on a kiss: “It both recognizes what already exists and brings something new into existence; it both is bred from, and breeds love.” And here he is on Eliot: “There are ways in which we should be simply grateful for his not always standing by his convictions. There is a generosity in all such acts of overriding oneself.” Let me conclude with one of my own favorite sentences from Ricks. In True Friendship, he writes, “By its nature, allusion may itself be twice blest, it blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.” Ricks’s criticism likewise is twice blest. It blesseth him that writes, and us that read.