Q&A …

… Christopher Ricks: “Criticism is being good at noticing things.” (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

What I’ve hoped to do, and may sometimes have done, is explain to myself some puzzle or problem. With Milton’s Grand Style, it was: how can it be that Milton was held by TS Eliot and by FR Leavis to be bad in some crucial respects, when I had loved reading Milton since I was a schoolboy? Would I have to revise my finding them to be very good critics, or give up thinking Milton a very good poet, or what? Well, there are many reasons why Eliot would have been hostile to Milton, so the tricky bit was my gratitude to Leavis. He was such a revelatory analyst of the behaviour of words, the way that they compete with one another, cooperate with one another, thumb their nose at one another. His practical criticism is simply superb – repeatedly. My line of argument was that Leavis and Eliot were wrong about what Paradise Lost was up to – what it was like. The point about the grand style is that it’s half the time not grand at all. It’s the book of mine that’s best argued – and someone (true, he is a friend) did say, on the 50th anniversary, “It’s very unusual for a literary argument to be won.”