"Ricks examines the transfer of poetic power in his brilliant and witty study.... Ricks [is] a painstaking scholar and editor as well as the most stringent and imaginative of close readers.... No other critic in our age...has dared to isolate this wonderfully ramifying, richly human subject [allusion]...and given it such intensive treatment. With this book about poets and their gratitude, Ricks has earned ours."--The Guardian
"Chistopher Ricks's Allusion to the Poets made it clear again just what is so great about a great literary critic."--Adam Phillips, Books of the Year, Observer Review
"[These] energetic essays [are] witty and engaging meditations...on the relationships between poem and cultural heritage.... A dazzling performance, especially considering the rapidity and variety of [Ricks's] references.... Consistently intellectual, challenging, and stimulating."--Choice
"Allusion to the Poets sparkles with an enjoyment that answers repeatedly to the delighted complexity and play of alert poetic imagination: for a long time to come, all good critics will be Christopher Ricks's heirs."--Peter McDonald, Times Literary Supplement
"Ricks is a remarkable literary critic, and this book explores the relationship of poets to their predecessors, extending in a new way the vein he mined in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice.... A lovely book, to be enjoyed and learned from, and not only, or even especially, by academics."--Virginia QuarterlyReview
"A monument to a whole waning era of professional reading. A monument, all right-but a functioning archive still, and a treasure trove.... A riveting achievement.... The lesson of Ricks's book couldn't be clearer. Debt is the mother of beauty. Which is a good enough motto for a continued return to his own stirring work."--Modern Language Quarterly
"[A] brilliant critic.... Ricks has valuable insights into the human psyche and the 'moral life.'"--P. N. Furbank, The Threepenny Review
