Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Christopher Ricks: True Friendship

Today I'm honored to welcome Christopher Ricks for a conversation about his latest book True friendship. Geoffrey Hill Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell under the sign of Elliot in pounds. The book is born out of a series of lectures presented at Bard College in 2007. Part of the Anthony Hecht lectures in the humanities is critical work consists of three essays that examine the relationships and literary Depp's that succeeds me of three post-war poets to their influential predecessors pound and Elliot. As I'm sure many of you know Christopher Ricks is Warren professor of humanities and co-director of the editorial Institute at Boston University formerly a professor of poetry at Oxford He's also the former president of the Association of literary scholars critics and writers at Boston University he teaches on topics from Shakespeare to Dylan and me and publishing now for over 50 for almost 50 years Professor Ricks previous books include Dylan's vision of sin illusion to the poets and the force of poetry. Sir Christopher was also not in the Queen's birthday honors last year. Ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for joining us today. Please join me in welcoming Christopher regs. Thank you. Thank you.

I'll start with the bad reviews that the book has just had. I have often said to my children that my books have received adverse reviews analysis I didn't mean at best that is a bad review. The word adverse being kind of protection for oneself. It says that of the three poets Geoffrey Hill Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell a trio of rather po faced post-war poets. So clearly he was very much enjoying the alliteration all the more and the assonance of Popo. It moved me to look up faced and to realize that though it's been affected by Poker Face it doesn't actually derive from poker face it's priggish. Now I don't have to say that Anthony hates Robert Lone Ranger for he'll seem to me not priggish and extraordinarily not poker faced. A friend suggested that if you start typing something in now the words always come up and the probably just typed poets

and poet faced in postwar period as the when you're emailing you know all these other people also called Trixie or bubbles come up and you send it to the wrong one. But I want to start by reading poems by these three poets under the sign of Elliot and pounded for remark by Elliot himself under the science really senior tour last fall. So I'm taking up his phrase and it's not the same as this reviewer says as being under the shadow of or under the influence of. But I'll start by saying something by reading these poets. I'll start with hair because the review says of hair. This is the weakest of my essays. For the plain reason I love plain reasons not to be a complex reasons the plain reason that Hank is Rick's is weakest poet. It says that they were the heck lecture so I had to talk about Hecht which is quite untrue. I wish to talk about. Rich's polite blindness to the distance between

Elliot's electrifying ale and Lee Elliot electrifying clearly this man knows how to use alliteration and so between the late Dr. Baird and head stiff florid but Thetic this is embarrassing. I think Hecht is a trooper I think is not in any way po faced He's the man who gave us in answer to no clue to Hmong. Dumb ass. He's the man who rethought classism as mens sana in men's sauna and he's the person who thought that Freud should really have written a book called civilization and its discotheque. So the idea that this of all of you that this person is sort of po faced and so on. I remind you of his most famous quote only poems that figure in the book because otherwise I could be cheating in my relations to the to the reviewer. So I remind you of the most famous poem The Dover bitch. A criticism of life. So there stood in Matthew are older than this girl with the cliffs of England crumbling away behind

them. And he said to her try to be true to me and I'll do the same for you. For things are bad all over etc. etc.. Well now I knew this. It's true she had read Sophocles in a fairly good translation and caught that bitter allusion to the sea but all the time he was talking she had in mind the notion of what his whiskers would feel like on the back of a neck. She told me later on after a while she got to looking out. At the lights across the channel and really felt sad thinking of all the wine and enormous beds and blandishments in French and the perfumes and they got really angry to have been brought all the way down from London and then be addressed as a sort of mournful cosmic last resort is really tough on a girl and she was pretty. Anyway she watched him pace the room and fingered his watch chain and seemed to sweat a bit and then she said one or two unprintable things. But you mustn't judge her by that what I mean to say is she's really all right I still see her once in a while and you always treats me right we have a

drink and I give her a good time and perhaps it's a year before I see her again. But there she is running to fat but dependable as they come. And sometimes I bring her a bottle of new damn movie. Now that's a contentious power and heck knew perfectly well a lot of people who took against the power in that he thought Ill judging it to say dammit but this is not the poem of a poet fate rather po faced poet. And I jump from that to his other famous rightly famous poem. More light more light. Composed in the tower before his execution. These moving verses and being brought at that time painfully to the stake submitted declaring the mass. I am pro My God to witness that I have made no crime. Nor was he for sake of courage but the death was horrible. The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite his legs were blistered sticks on which the black sat bubbled and burst as he howled for the kindly light.

And that was but one and by no means one of the worst permitted at least his pitiful dignity. And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ shall judge all men for his soul's tranquillity. We move now to outside a German word. Three men that they're commanded to dig a hole in which the two Jews are ordered to lie down and be bedded alive by the third who is a pole. Not light from the shrine. Weimar be on the hill no light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse. A Luger settled back deeply in his behalf. He was ordered to change places with the Jews. Much casual the effort drained away their souls. The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin when only the head was exposed to the order came to dig him out again and get back in. No light no light in the blue polish. When he finished riding back down the the loop a half it lightly in its behalf. He was shot in the

belly and in three house bled to death. No prayers or incense rose up in those hours which grew to be years and every day came you go from the options sifting through crisp air and settled upon his eyes in a black suit. The contempt of the English Review of a poem is about kinds is quite it quite extraordinary. Disagreement as to whether I gauge it illuminating me with the poems is one thing but to have that poem described wanted to that I say stiff florid but that is its amazing I think public demonstration of inability incapacity to read and care about poetry and that there are of course others of hex poems are just read a couple more I don't know. He gave a beautiful reading here at Harvard a few years ago I don't know how people in the room who were able to be there. Here's a poem on it. Which purple looks if it's on a small scale in school curriculum. Words which don't pulse with life. That's what they should do.

As though it were reluctant to be day morning deploys a scale of rarities in gray and winter settles down in chainmail victorious over legions of gold and red. The smoky souls of Stone's blunt penciling as of lead pared down the world to Dylan less monotones of graveyard with the vapors of a fair and we reckon through a pause save for the garbage men our children are the first ones out of doors book bagged and padded out at mouth and nose. They manufacture go it's George Washington's and Hove Banquo's the Union and Confederate hoes. And are themselves the ghosts file cabinet Gray of some departed us signing our lives away on for past slewed windows of a bus. I think you're exceptionally view and again this is deflowered pathetic verse it's clearly

risk taking. Yes I mean but it's very very delicate and it knows about the sacrifice always that I makes to here there is no way in which I can pronounce the word hosts so that it is an apostrophe and not apostrophe s the Union and Confederate hosts H O S T S apostrophe as on everything in that the I need not not a single host but the two of those and so on and the beautiful use of the word bus at the end. A bass is for everybody. It's called a bass because it is for everybody to know Miller bass and so on and it's gathering every curriculum. It's going to end in some such way a beautiful poem of hope and of dismay at the same time and the last of the poems of his I want to read I hope in refutation of what the reviewer said is the voice of the sales we that this curriculum the time curriculum I think a voice or to say else we have helped reading this poem. It's really extraordinary how to listen of course to a poet

reading a poem called a voice at the sales. It is rather strange to be speaking but I know you are there wanting to know. As if it were worth knowing. Nor is it important that I died in combat in a good cause or an indifferent one. Such things it may surprise you are not regarded suddenly too much of this. You are bound to be disappointed wanting to know. Are there any trees. It is so different from what you suppose and the darkness is not darkness exactly but patient silence with droll the sad knowledge that it was almost impossible not to hurt anyone. Whether by action or inaction. At the beginning of course there was a sense of loss not for one's own life but of what seemed the easy just horrible lives one might have led. Fame or wealth are hard to achieve and goodness even harder but the cost of all of them is a familiar deformity such as every one suffers from an allergy to certain foods. Nausea at the

sight of blood a slight impediment of speech shames of one's own body a fear of heights or claustrophobia. What you learn has nothing whatever to do with joy nor with sadness either. You are mostly silent. You come to a gentle indifference about being thought either a fool or someone with valuable secrets. It may be that the ultimate wisdom lies in saying nothing. I think I may have already said too much. Now I think he's a really touchy. And as I say to listen to him reading it is very very extraordinary now. Now these are all poems which I think a directly influenced by the not influenced only by the memory of Hamlet in the voice of the sales ghosts are everywhere in them the ghosts of other poets and so on. So one of the points of principle are come to be free we might question time talk about it what kind of claim 1 mates for the presence of Elliott and pound in these poems. And at one

end you've got what I think of as a conviction that the poem would not have taken exactly the form it has taken were it not for the ghost of a previous poem in a previous poet. But that's not the same as an illusion because you might not be calling that into play as it might have gone to the creating of your poem without going to its meaning. Though that is something that people have different principles or theories about. So the adverse reviewer says I use far too many terms for the simple thing influence whereas I think of course that what I'm wanting to do is say sometimes something is actively called into play. Sometimes it's not called into play but you believe as I do with real poems that the poem would not have taken this form had it not been for you. A compound some compound ghost or ghosts and in the plural of the hill poems I just read from the three poets who were not Elliot and pound as it were the hill poems and again are we to think of this horse faced

a song from Armenia. Roughly silvered leaves that are the snow on our seen through those leaves the sun lays down the foliage of shade. A drinking fountain poses its head two or three inches from the trough. St.. No one sucks there gripping the rim. Why do I have to relive even how your mouth and your hand running over me damn it as a lizard like a sinew of water. A sinew of water is from Pound very very strong extremely wonderful for its taken. Taken in TAR in that way is one of a present from Ezra Pound. The Triumph of Love number 52. Read this and they said something about him. Admittedly at times this moral landscape to my exasperated ear emits archaic bird rings like a small high fenced

electricity substation of certain of uncertain age in a field corner where the flies gather and old horses shake their sides. The reviewer in the New York Review of Books who says that I have a new poignancy I didn't know I had an old poignancy But I mean you could but let's not go there my doctor your old trouble hope is not so. No no it's not my old trouble. What was my old trouble about. So a new poignancy attends on me because I have been rendered superfluous by Google. That is I used to kind of read all these things or remember them but now you do that because you just type in posthaste and it immediately gives you always weaving with Poe so you don't have to notice anything. I think that isn't true and a friend of mine the poet Phyllis Levitan wrote saying she was in a an elevator recently and she saw three people where she assumed a relationship between the three of them that turned out to be correct but was quite different from having ascertained through a search engine that these people were related to one another. She she felt she could look at them and understand as it were the

cousin hood of them or which was a sibling which you and you and she said that is not at all the same as going to going somewhere and being able to find out whether people relate she was talking about the apprehension of similitude in dissimilar to you and the terrific pleasure of coming at that through trained instincts as it were rather than through a machine. So I so I like the idea of poignancy except that it was in the vicinity of my being 76 which others say because I put new poignancy 76 not long for this world and so on this is this is a little subtext from somebody who is of course in his prime or so he believes. When I was writing about this poem and I say that we wouldn't have it in the form we have it if it weren't for a poem by Philip Larkin. Geoffrey Hill he is Philip Larkin with the hatred passing the love of women. I'm sorry. He really hates year three here because whenever you go to a bookshop Jeffrey who really hates are going to go to a bookshop. They either have lots of luck and they don't have lots of you or they have no Larkin because they've all been sold so that it's an

impossible situation I remember going around the bookshops of New York with Jeffrey and wherever we went they either had his poems dead on the shelf. All they all all they didn't have the dream and that they never had them and so on as against the selling like hotcakes Seamus Heaney and so on. So that complicated world I think it is very very close to a lock in power and the reviewer Adam Kirsch says but it's close to the Larkin poem because horses do shake their stuff. Well I think horses do shake their head but I want to know about my exasperated. What is this exasperated it and what's the use of aspiration and you look up everything that was written about the Ark and you find that it is the ear that heat coming back to partly because Jeffrey is deaf in one ear and has shown his exasperated ear means only one of them you know is rather beautifully using it using a circumstantial fact will make it sound as if he means it is but it's also because the coffin is what Geoffrey Hill hates and he believes Larkin is a contributor to cook often in rather than clear up of cook off an e

exasperated ear to cut this out because a friend of mine said it had to go. I say the exasperated ear is beautiful but is exasperated is a are dilated into this huge and terrifying thing. Exactly it is compacted into it and it's in order. In that word so it is like the line that I love from Eliot it is like politic cautious and meticulous which has P L O N I u s in sequence. Now I'm not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to me. Politic cautious or meticulous Polonius behind the iris of the line. Just spread out in that beautiful way. So but I was persuaded by Lisa Reed in ski that at that point my reader my one reader would work I would do would do something else some songs I know a lot but idly exasperated emits the word ear emits a bit exasperated extraordinarily dilated. But what's the fixation the fixation

has to do whether Geoffrey Hill knows it or not with the relation to the other poem grass which is one of you know that locket and anthology pieces. To mortify here poems is mostly going to be my might be in these precious hundred twenty one from the triumph of love. So what is faith if it is not inescapable in durance revisited. The Ferns are breast high head high. The day's last truce with the hinterlands of light is this instant fast seeing into itself its own signature on things that recognize salvation. I am an old man a child. The horizon is the Hearns country. Visuals of course and its country one of things I wanted to talk about you see repeatedly is how in his case he is immensely adversarial posture towards Elliott is is valuably belied by the fact that the poems have the most important kind of gratitude that is they create new poems out of this

sort of dissent from Eliot. This last one is Ray Elliot light or just read the scenes from comas. Nothing is unforgettable but guilt guilt of the moment to be made eternal. Reading immortal literature is a curse. Beatrice in the changeling makes me sweat even more than Faust. Helen let alone Barlow's offstage blasphemous fun with words or pounds last words to silence. Well let well alone. The gadgetry of nice determinism makes brave comedians all the better if you go mad like a grasshopper. A cry from the fields. The grief of comedy you have to laugh. So those are the hill poems and they're all they're all discussed in the book in terms of what they owed to somebody whom they tried in a way to disown the Hicks case is in a way simple and turns it almost entirely on anti-Semitism which is why it is to me

extraordinary that the more light more light is full of memories of Elliot seemed very very distant from that friend of mine John McHugh in England to just send me something that I had not that that I hadn't noticed. Let me just see if I can find that. Yes he says this The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin of that being buried alive a hideous rewriting germs as a hideous rewriting of my color mounting firmly to the chin. So to take the world of Jennifer Prufrock from the poet you have to engage with all the time because of antiseptics of a hit. That's the extraordinary depth of engagement an impossible impossible problem for Hector Elliott not of pound heck to heck has a simple relation to power and he has complicated feelings about Patton's statement but he has a simple relation really. So the last of the poets and again I can think of this in terms of po po faced. So here are the LOL poems

and then our sake up a point to principal that will make conversation. I took deliberately the two poems by Lowell about Elliot and LB he's a different case from the others because he said directly about the poets which is not something that can kill or heck to do with Ellen. DSL is caught between two streams of traffic in the gloom of Memorial Hall all in Harvard's war dead and he. Don't you loath to be compared with your relatives I do. I've just found two of mine reviewed by hype. Oh he wiped the floor with them and I was delighted. Then on with wardens paced across the yard talking of power and it's balls to say any pretense to be Ezra. He's better than this year he no longer wants to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Yes he's better. You speak he said when he talked to us. By then I had absolutely nothing to say. One muse one music one your luck lost in the dark night of the

brilliant talkers humor and on from the everlasting draw. So that's the poem about nearly it and it is full of course of Elliot but also down today. It's fire the area of Little getting and he and his lovely LB as horizontal on a deck chair in the ward of the criminal man had a man without shoestrings cloying the Social Credit broadside from your table. You saying here with a black suit and black briefcase in the brief. An abomination. Possums all marsh to turn then sprung. Propeller and the decade gone and three years later Elliot dead you saying who's left alive to understand my jokes my old brother in the arts Besides he was a smash of a poet. You showed me your Blash bent hands saying worms. When I talk that nonsense about Jews on the room while it's all been you still love me

and I. Who else has been in purgatory. You I began with a swelled head and then to a swelled feet. The Dante's bit let me say the other great thing in Harvard is pound reading from the teenie as translated by love and it's impossible there's a lot for which poem should not be forgiven. And there it's your mate. Remember God God will forgive it says make. Well there's a lot in pound that shouldn't be. But to hear him as an old man reading the Burnett Latine Yepes impounds allows translation of a very extraordinary. You should listen to it over there. What happened to it. So the point to Prince about what I wanted to do is show different kinds of engagement with previous poets a lot of things can be seen in terms of ghosts compound ghosts and so on. They have a different engagement. I mean hill in his criticism saying what he is unable then to realize in his poetry and so much better. HECHT never

feeling actually under Hague has no bloomy in the thing at all. I mean the bloomin thing you know the wish to kill your father sleeping with your mother is not obligatory in the blue scenario though it might be desirable. This is a real problem when you take it over to the women writers because it's not clear what Electra can do that can compete with us in these matters. But hex has none of that extraordinary and misgiving quality in him. A low then has this intense personal friendship and love for these people reciprocated by Ali and not reciprocated by pound. But the very first letter in the lower left volume of low letters is a letter to the pound. About wishing to be with him and study with him and learn from him and so on and that goes all the way all the way through. The two points of principle. Maybe them onto one ism I'm making this all up and I'm sick and I'm hearing these writers in some sort of echo chamber and they're not really present in the poems. There's plenty of external evidence of the knowledge of these writers in these three later parts and each of them wrote at length about

these two poets. So I have less of a problem with that. There's how far it ripples out is always a question as an actual some stone is thrown in the pond how far it ripples out that seem to be always up for argument. The point at which I'm thinking I'm hearing something and I'm doing the imagining not the poet. Now I think that the poets are all much more imaginative than I am and although it's a kind of tribute to be told I'm making it all up it seems to me ridiculous I don't know that people who tell me that Bob Dylan is a mindless mindless drug addict and that I've noticed things in there which he didn't notice himself he may never notice until afterwards a great statement on this is Keats afterwards confirmed in a dozen features of propriety to the point of which you can't even believe that you wrote it. Now I'm not a writer so I compared well but no problem with that. But in Keats's case he writes it as it seems to him. It's inspiration he's inspired to do this it is only afterwards that is confirmed and doesn't

feature propriety. Hopkins is a great letter about Tennyson saying you could imagine you think you could imagine if you were Shakespeare you could write this right Hamlet that is just what you cannot imagine. And that's the difference between you know 10 percent of his greatest and no amount of saying I can imagine if I would send you to that one. Whereas the tendency to be knocked out and you can imagine if you were tennis and you could do that. So to wonderful point I think about what inspiration is. So there seemed to be something like the point principle is the critic making it up since the critic is often and in my case is entirely a failed poet though Jay Perrine or Jaipur for short. JJ Perrine has just a Christopher Ricks poet critic and I think he's been following foraging in the school magazine from 1942. How clever of him to go to Wantage bar in Utah and find a poem by Christopher Reeve that there aren't any poems by me in it said out of kindness. But that's not what it feels like. OK OK so let me hear sort of any any questions either

about these poets or about what I think the book is doing one last thing. Hausmann it is very unreasonable for people to be depressed by unfavorable reviews. They should say to themselves do I write better than murder and surely that leads to my worse treated than they were and they €40 if you're if you're a critic you really what do I do I write better than Matthew Arnold. No no children that matter. OK. Thank you any any questions please. Thank you thank you. Well that's maybe why I can't Condon it because I insufficient I read broad to get only in translation I carry Thomas I think has done a wonderful translation as others have. And Jorge it's admiration translation brought to you would be an important feature of this. Derek Walcott the poetry I do not and I do not know well. And in some way or other I think I'm out of sympathy with it. This isn't at all the same as wanting to bad mouth now or any other occasion but in some way or other and there's always this question is it

axis transmitter or is it one's own receiver. There are ways in which in comparison with some of the poets in the room today I've haven't been reached about the poems that is a sense in which I see not feel a bit of a way to get it. Ridges where putting something but I think that the I mean I think those three poets have written very well spoken very well mostly interviews have a great beauty are about what they mean to one another and especially their relation to it not being mainland England in that ride. How far is a tax he need for being cost situated by the English literary world because we like a kind of a a token Irishman. I mean here in Boston they sounded like a token Englishman but you couldn't do something about it. I have to say I thought you were in the SE about the friendship of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. I just waiting I did indeed I was about I was about to quote a whole Johnson poem many six lines long in order in order to rise to this to the challenge but unfortunately if you went to

now rather than Then Shakespeare's birthday St. George's Day. I also though a question might be about Why haven't I taken American nationality. They've taken to ask me that when I come into the country usually if I'm on 20 years. Why have you not become an American citizen. Now there's a side to me that wants to say because I'm no less Patry article patriotic than you officer and then I realize Don't be dragged into a cell and beaten to a bloody pulp. So I don't say that I say well you know I've got you I'm in England and I got said the fiction we are sinking rapidly into the ocean but you know there are aspects of it you know the most suspense but that but I so I wondered since it's in George's Day of course he didn't live much in England. But thank you. One footnote from Lyndall Gordon is worth a king's ransom. I'm being threatened. I don't know because I felt sort of don't know I don't I don't you know I felt like a Jewish mother so you know like but you know the series you know you made it there with a white Scuse me you don't seem to know about it

because by your book there's no other book like there's no book that level for that. You want the work but you gotta let me show you people like you like oh and they're not getting you know cars. There's one form of my business. Benjamin Disraeli the way things get the way to get things done is not to care who gets the credit for doing them. It's a bit more saintly than I am but it is true if we're going to if you were running a university the way things get things done. Of course I am told that I'm ripping you. That is the that is that I ripped Eliot all that you know what you got well I think no thank you very much and I look forward in there. No no no but you see it I mean it it's a it's a complicated. Well I mean that that that is a book by Eliot not a book by me. I think editing is terrifically worth doing and I was lucky in Oxford when I was

growing up that I was taught by people who were not only little critics and literary stories but were editors F.W. Bateson a digit pope as well as writing books about was with the history of the English language in relation to and talk. Now though that has tended to be a division here I'm the Sabbath I think across to Harvard that his role in this was an extraordinary editor of Keats but he was not an extraordinary historian holy true critic. I mean mostly to put it all into one kind of thing. Whereas the these are these mutually no children foster but none of these things I've been I've been lucky in that respect. Do you want to know about that. The error the errors on page 60 and it's my saying for some reason that I know it perfectly well that Jeffrey Hill's pamphlet the breaches of civil civil power was 2000 and two when it was 2005. So I've corrected that creep in at night into bookstores and put it right and I do a mayor culpa see right

underneath. But so that's wrong I ask myself how does this happen I know it how it happens. It's published in 2007. I put two thousand and two because there are 2 years between 5 and 7. It doesn't make sense but when one is plumbing the dent depths of one's individuality and amazing this that sort of thing money when one comes up with in the small hours how much time writing I know is 2005 I own it. You know I own that pamphlet edition of it so. But on the other hand it pleases Jeffrey no end you know. I opened it and the very first thing I saw was an important error of fact that he hasn't actually communicated with me about the book but if he were to do so that is the line it would take. I tried so I marked it and I said the evidence of a original sin is to be found on page 16. And no doubt on other pages and so on. So you're both correct that if anybody has contributed threatens to my ways to make it good or always just internal external evidence the external evidence for instance in some of my cases down evidence.

If you take Christensen's Eliot about hill's use of f h Bradley as a stick with which to beat Eliot that's very dangerous I mean Eliot love defanged Bradley. Jeffrey would never have read any F-8 Bradley were it not for Elliott's writing at the Harvard dissertation and writing one at the other. And many many essays about it. So so the survey of a strange world of gratitude and gratitude. The case for Elliott's lines influencing hills at a crucial point in that weight of the world weight of the world is not part of the case for it is that those bits of Bradley that I add deuce as having come earlier are quoted by Geoffrey himself. You didn't know. So it's time to say what reason. Now that isn't of course proof what we know is we're in a world in which there's no proof. You can make things good. You can give evidence but you must know that you can never prove a point of literal interpretation of literary history. You cannot prove it by and by the standards of proof that should obtain before you

execute it. Whatever it might be by their standards approval before you kind of say that you are an aeronautical engineer I mean the you know there are tests as to whether these things fly or not. There's no interpretation that doesn't fly. You know I mean I give you an example this prompts doesn't fly. He works his work I mind from Tennyson's poem Ulysses or the proposition The mind is a verb. He watches work. My work is being a mind. OK now to let me go sit in the store is nothing like a mind so quite why you suddenly got a pickaxe and he's excavating coal and so on but it is kind of possible isn't he works at work. What do I do. I mine from time. And that's been put forward by not stupid man within a stupid moment in education. Right but you can't prove if some is a how do you prove it. Proving that what you do is I'd use evidence from elsewhere in tennis and his letters poems and so on. And of course outside Tennyson. But the so I think you just you just add to

use other things which make for what you have said and you try not to cheat and neglect the things which work against what you said. You know every now and then you make a concession and every now and then it's a real concession that I can't. I'm not nearly as common in this one as Imus I'm up to them. Thank you know I had different relations with the three of them. I partly this was sound as a kind of a piccy as it were the word favor for me is always tricky because for me it suggests something other than thinking which is the best if I'm going to ask me what is my fav. They they often say what's my favorite Dylan song and it isn't the one that I think is the best is the one that has a particular hold on one's affections. So a direct personal appeal or something in a way dim.. It's why one shouldn't have a favorite book of the Bible is a circle in hell for people who have a favorite book of the Bible and gave it a job is best but you know a lot of

favorite. Right I mean isn't that right. What's your favorite member of the Trinity. Oh it's tricky right. I want to do you think the Holy Ghost had me and I haven't had as much attention as he or she deserves for the last few centuries but so so he'll he'll have to have a kind of pride about him. Which is a personal pride though not solely that in that I published an essay on a long long long ago early in the 60s as I knew him slightly at Oxford and I published the first essay on him written by me I found recently a copy of the magazine which Geoffrey had given away to a bookshop side in Geoffrey Hill at the Johns Christopher Ricks is this it. And he'd given it away. So that's it's such a complex relationship as it were with people in general and poets in particular. And then within that with Geoffrey in particular. So I feel I mean I have been very it is not surprising to me that the current issue of Private Eye attacks him and me in the same paragraph it attacks him for having written the worst lines perhaps ever written in any poem and it hacks me for having brought him from Cambridge to

Boston. He has followed in my steps see themselves on things like that but I have Anthony Hecht I didn't I knew somewhat didn't know that at all. I didn't wasn't close to him but I had managed him very very much. And I'm a great with him in a whole series of ways and I'm very very touched by the poems. Lowell was very good to me. LOL LOL made a change or two as a result of suggestions that I made to him. And I got to know him because I was writing about the three books published so there's a per person or time mentioned. And I don't see any much point in it. I mean you haven't asked me to but as it were ranking them as if it were a horse race and I know you weren't asking that I need I need them all for different reasons and rather different times. I need power and less than any of the others. I thought of five poets here. I think the best pound is very very extraordinary and compelling. But he he never moves me to tears. Elliott does

especially in those things that are being very brave. The awful daring of a moments or an action a joke that is just a just a part of what of what a touching wonderful things say I've written I've written often about Empson and I nearly did. I was and I was doing it free for the London books and I nearly did a book which would be the five or six things I've written about Empson plus all of em since left this to me is don't I mean here's a lead and they haven't been published. Some of them about emotion but then the sun won't allow this Emson sun Mogador who is at odds with his son Jake disagrees about whether or not his father's work were really about giving permission. So there's been so that a but I share your I mean I love I really loved him so and just to think about it makes it makes me smile and laugh and be happy. Thank you very much.