"Sir Christopher Bruce Ricks", British Academy/FBA is a British (although he lives in the US) literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (US) and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (England) from 2004 to 2009. He is the immediate past-president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.

He is known as a champion of Victorian literature#Poetry/Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has analysed at book length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers pretentious (Marshall McLuhan, Christopher Norris (critic)/Christopher Norris, Geoffrey Hartman, Stanley Fish); and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous (F. R. Leavis, W. K. Wimsatt, Christina Stead). Hugh Kenner has praised his 'intent eloquence', and Geoffrey Hill his 'unrivalled critical intelligence'. W. H. Auden described Ricks as 'exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding'. John Carey (critic)/John Carey calls him the 'greatest living critic'.

If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous critics! More Christopher Ricks on Wikipedia.

When a language creates -- as it does -- a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.

Dylan's Visions of Sin.

That's not the same thing as saying that the latest account that he gives should be unmistakably taken as the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I wouldn't say he never wanted to be followed or be called a leader. (But) he probably wanted it less than it seemed at the time.

I think the wish to disassociate from the cult of self is a good human impulse.